Centuries before carmaker Ettore Bugatti put his brother Rembrandt’s rampant elephant sculpture as the hood ornament on his luxury flagship, the Bugatti Royale, baroque master sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini decorated his carriage with four of his own works: a set of gilded bronze grotesque screaming heads. The four heads were all cast from the same model and have wide-open mouths, arched eyebrows over bulging eyes rolled upwards, windswept hair in pointy sections and beards to match. They each have a hole at the nape of the neck in which tall plumes were inserted to add even more drama to the carriage in movement. From his earliest days as a professional sculptor, Bernini was a fan of exaggerated open-mouthed grotesques. His first one, The Damned Soul (1619), he made when he was only 20, and was still collaborating with his father before striking out on his own a year later under the patronage of the wealthy and powerful Cardinal Scipione Borghese. When he was commissioned to restore the Ludovisi Ares, a 2nd century A.D. Roman copy of a 4th century B.C. Greek sculpture of a youthful god of war that had been unearthed in Rome in 1622, he added an entirely incongruous sword hilt with a screaming grotesque as the pommel. Bernini cast the four screaming heads between 1650 and 1655 and placed them on his personal carriage. A design he made for the carriage of the King of Spain has similar grotesques on the corners of the canopy, but those are reliefs rather than stand-alone sculptures. At some point, Bernini removed his screaming heads from his carriage and had them mounted to black and white Marquina marble bases. They decorated the piano nobile salone (formal reception room) in his palace at Via della Mercede 11 in Rome. After Gian Lorenzo’s death in 1680, his grandson Prospero Bernini inherited the palace and the bulk of the collection. The four bronze heads are noted in the inventory of 1681. Incredibly enough, the set has been in the Bernini family this entire time. The last direct male heir, another Prospero Bernini, died in 1858, but the bronzes passed to his daughter and continued down through her line culminating in the current owners who have now decided to sell them. The screaming heads have been consigned for sale to art dealer Flavio Gianassi, but they have been declared objects of exceptional historical and artistic interest so they are not allowed to leave Italy. The set is priced at €1.6 million ($1,771,000), a high price for pieces that cannot be exported to the deep-pocketed buyers of the international market.