Franco Mormando

I am Professor of Italian and History (affiliate faculty) as well as chairperson of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Boston College where I have taught since 1994. I was born and raised in Manhattan of an Italian immigrant father (from Basilicata, Italy) and an Italian-American (but completely bilingual and bicultural) mother. I have a large family still in Italy and have visited them regularly since 1975. My B.A. (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) is from from Columbia University (I spent my junior year in Paris and Florence as part of my wonderful Columbia education). In college I was a French and Italian major, thinking that I would go into international law, but after my junior year abroad, I realized that I liked the "international" part more than the "law" part and so gave up that idea and went on to graduate school in Italian literature, thanks to a full fellowship from Harvard. I finished at Harvard with two graduate degrees, an M.A. and Ph.D. both in the field of Italian literature. I am a former Jesuit priest (in the order for nearly 20 years, starting right after Harvard, 1983-2004). As part of my long Jesuit formation, I studied philosophy for two years (at the Jesuit Gregorian University in Rome) and theology for four years (at the Jesuit school of theology, Berkeley, California, now part of Santa Clara University). I, in the process, obtained a further degree, the "licentiate" (i.e., a Master’s degree) in church history (also from the Jesuit School of Theology Berkeley). All of this education has resulted in the thoroughly interdisciplinary way in which I conduct both my teaching and my research. It also resulted in two art exhibitions that I originated and co-curated, "Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image" (1999) and "Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500-1800" (2006). My Harvard doctoral dissertation and initial scholarly career both focused on the field of popular preaching and popular religion, culminating in my 1999 book, "The Preacher's Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy" [University of Chicago Press], which won the Marraro Prize for Excellence in Italian Scholarship from the American Catholic Historical Association. My introduction to Bernini and the Baroque (apart from the thoroughly engaging required introductory course at Columbia called "Art Humanities") came during my two-year residence in Rome as a Jesuit, living right next door to the Jesuit mother church in Piazza del Gesù: living in Rome one is simply surrounded by Bernini and his influence and I couldn't help but become fascinated by this multi-talented man who so dominated and so defined Baroque Rome. It is impossible to understand Rome -- the Rome of today -- without understanding Bernini. But I didn't start to study Bernini in earnest until the year 2000, and, after 11 years of intense research, produced an extensively annotated English translation of the biography of Bernini written by his son, Domenico ("The Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini," published by Penn State Univ. Press) and my own biography of "Bernini: Bernini: His Life and His Rome" (also published by the University of Chicago Press). My Bernini biography is indeed the very first ever in the English language and, if I must say so myself, is the very first biography in any language since Bernini's death to pierce through the long-standing whitewashing, idealizing myths about Bernini (which, unfortunately, almost all previous Bernini scholars -- most especially Howard Hibbard and Irving Lavin -- by and large simply repeated uncritically) to uncover the utter, if at times unsettling, truth about his personality, his behavior, his successes and failures. Since the publication of my Bernini book, I have discovered that many "pious" readers are quite distressed to discover these "inconvenient truths" about Bernini and his patrons, especially the popes and cardinals -- all of what I report in the book is fully and securely documented and not mere "gossip" -- and are angrily resentful for having their long-held but erroneous vision of the artist and his world completely upset and rather than admit openly the cause of their upset, instead, accuse the author of being a bad writer, or bad scholar, or not paying enough attention to Bernini's works of art. The biography is not meant to be a guide to Bernini's art -- there are plenty of those kinds of books around -- though you will learn much in the book that will help you understand and enjoy more deeply Bernini's many works of art in a wider, deeper context. I continue to study the life and career of Bernini, publishing a lot of my research on my personal website, www.francomormando.com, where you will also find more information about me and my work (including reviews and updates on the latest discoveries regarding Bernini's life and work).