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When an artist meets his destiny, the course of art history shifts. The Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica present at Palazzo Barberini a project that brings renewed attention to one of the most decisive partnerships of seventeenth-century Europe: that between Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Urbano VIII, born Maffeo Barberini. The exhibition offers a fresh reading of the birth of the Baroque through the personal, intellectual, and political dialogue between the artist and his first great patron. Urbano VIII was not only the pope of Bernini’s maturity, but the true discoverer of his talent, the figure who accompanied his rise from early beginnings to the monumental undertakings at St Peter’s. Marking the four-hundredth anniversary of the consecration of the new Vatican Basilica, the exhibition brings together masterpieces from international museums and private collections, many of which have never before been shown in Italy. Sculptures, paintings, drawings, and models trace the transition from late Mannerism to a disruptive, theatrical, and profoundly modern language. Through marble portraits, painted works, and evidence from Rome’s great building sites, the exhibition conveys the complexity of an unrepeatable season in which power, art, and vision merged, giving shape to a new way of understanding the image.