Add to ORKGThe oft cited man on the street has never heard of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, although this great artist was perhaps the genius of the seventeenth century. Such ignorance, it is my contention in this thesis, arises from the myth that links creativity with illness, genius with insanity. The same man on the street often knows of other artists not so much, unfortunately, from their work, as from the much publicized idiosyncrasies of their personalities. Bernini, as I have endeavoured to show in this paper, was a man of outstanding stability, vitality, discipline— and a man entirely committed to, and involved in, the time in which he lived. Symbolic of this balance and involvement, it is also my contention, are Bernini's Fountains in Rome. It is ge...