Torn between fact and wish, between cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all but caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous sartorial abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or bronze, of the everlasting commonplaces of rhetoric–the heroism, the holiness, the sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires, for the most part in vain.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception 1963