Do you know "The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa" by Bernini? Well, you should!

I admit I am in love with Bernini, but how not to be?
In Santa Maria della Vittoria, a church near Termini Station there is another master piece by
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, L'estasi di Santa Teresa.

The entire ensemble was overseen and completed by a mature Bernini during the Pamphili papacy of Innocent X. When Innocent acceded to the papal throne, he shunned Bernini’s artistic services; the sculptor had been the favourite artist of the previous and profligate Barberini pope. Without papal patronage, the services of Bernini's studio were therefore available to a patron such as the Venetian Cardinal Federico Cornaro (1579–1653). Cornaro had chosen the hitherto unremarkable church of the Discalced Carmelites for his burial chapel.The selected site for the chapel was the left transept that had previously held an image of ‘St. Paul in Ecstasy’, which was replaced by Bernini’s dramatization of a religious experience undergone and related by the first Discalced Carmelite saint, who had been canonised not long before, in 1622.

 The two central sculptural figures of the swooning nun and the angel with the spear derive from an episode described by Teresa of Avila in her autobiography, ‘The Life of Teresa of Jesus’ (1515–1582)

She wrote: " I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying"

Caroline Babcock speaks of Bernini's melding of sensual and spiritual pleasure in the "orgiastic" grouping as both intentional and influential on artists and writers of the day. 

Irving Lavin said "the transverberation becomes a point of contact between earth and heaven, between matter and spirit".

As Bernini biographer Franco Mormando points out, although Bernini's point of departure for his depiction of Teresa's mystical experience was her own description, there were many details about the experience that she never specifies (e.g., the position of her body) and that Bernini simply supplied from his own artistic imagination, all with an aim of increasing the nearly transgressively sensual charge of the episode: "Certainly no other artist, in rendering the scene before of after Bernini dared as much in transforming the saint's appearance."

You have to see this sculpture!

You have to visit Rome! 

You have to be our guest! ;)

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