Sculptor and impresario, Gianlorenzo Bernini was no enthusiast of Caravaggio's naturalism or of northern artists’ working practices. His transformations of his own models apparently owed more to study of Annibale Carracci's Roman work, with its naturalism mediated by a dynamic emulation of Raphael and classical sculpture. However, Bernini did once make a theatrical comment on the practice of drawing ad vivum, dal vivo. His comedy I due Covielli, put on in 1637 on an improvised stage in Piazza San Pietro, was created at a point when the popularity of Caravaggism and of other forms of naturalism had peaked in Rome. Bernini typically wrote, directed and acted in the play. The curtain opened to reveal to the audience that there was another audience depicted on the other side of the stage, and this second audience was also seated in the familiar terrain of the Vatican. Bernini and his brother then came on stage. The two men sat down, one facing the ‘real’ audience and the other facing the ‘feigned’ audience. Each then proceeded to sketch the view from where they sat, thus depicting, ad vivum, both the real and the represented topography.

Bernini and his brother enacted the by-then well-known motif of the draftsman at work within a drawing, and in putting it on stage, they exposed it as a comically empty cliché. The represented artist, representing things that we can see ourselves, is hardly a riveting sight on the stage. Doubling this action, and positioning each artist so that they faced the real and the represented audiences simultaneously, at least made a witty play on the old theatrical pleasure of tricking the eye of the beholder. Which of these two divided realities was an imitation, and which the real?