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St. Teresa in Ecstasy
(sculpture, 1652)
Perhaps never in the history of art have sensuality and spirituality been so inseparably brought together than in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s statue of the famous Spanish nun St. Teresa of Ávila. It is generally considered to be the greatest work of the man who is probably the finest sculptor of all time. Bernini combined the insights he garnered from his studies of classical Greek and Roman sculpture with the innovations of the great Renaissance artists to create sculptures that almost seem to live and breathe, and none more so than his sensuous carving of the famous saint caught in a moment of mystical ecstasy.
In order to avoid an arranged marriage with a man she didn’t love, Teresa of Ávila entered the convent at age nineteen. At first, her new vocation brought her neither happiness nor contentment, and shortly after embarking on her life as a nun she became seriously ill and suffered periods of deep depression. But in time she settled into her new vocation. Then one day, while praying and singing a hymn, she experienced a rapturous sense of God’s love coursing through her whole being. It was to be the first of numerous such visitations of God’s presence, so real and palpable that she felt consumed by his love and exalted into a state of ecstasy. In her spiritual autobiography, Teresa describes one of these visitations: a vision of an angel carrying a fire-tipped spear with which he repeatedly pierced her heart, an act that induced a state of spiritual rapture. “The pain,” she wrote, “was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God.”1
It is this moment that Bernini has fashioned in marble. The cupid-like angel hovers just above her, his gilt bronze arrow poised to plunge again into Teresa’s heart. He is a figure of delicacy and grace, but Teresa does not look upon him. Instead, her head is thrown back and her eyes are closed. Her mouth gapes open, and her body seems to collapse backward against the force of love that is so violently thrust upon her and into her heart. Teresa seems lost in the billowing, twisting folds of her heavy robe, as bronze rays rain down divine light upon the scene. Though this highly dramatic tableau is carved of heavy marble, it appears to the viewer to be almost weightless, the saint and the angel floating upon a cloud suspended above the altar of the Cornaro Chapel in Rome.
St. Teresa in Ecstasy by Bernini, Cornaro Chapel, Rome [© Nina Aldin Thune/Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-2.5]
The statue of Teresa and the angel is the centerpiece of a visual feast in the chapel, an arrangement of sculpture, painting, lighting effects, and architecture, all designed by Bernini to frame this unforgettable masterpiece. He has created not just a sculpture but an entire environment. It is surrounded by dark, patterned marble columns and set in a convex niche that serves to enhance the brightness of the central figures, creating an impression that the very walls of the building have parted to reveal this dramatic moment. Illusionistic windows have been carved on the walls of either side of St. Teresa in Ecstasy, through which sculptures of members of the Cornaro family (the patrons of the work) gaze reverently at the unfolding scene. Some of them even lean over the parapet, silent and rapt witnesses to the mystical event.
It is not surprising that the utter ecstasy of Teresa’s expression has put some in mind of the ecstasy of a sexual climax. The intense pleasure and pain she feels can only be expressed in ways that mirror one of the most ecstatic experiences most humans can identify with. And that is what Bernini was seeking to do, and what he did so well and so often—create realistic works that show the emotional intensity of an encounter with God. The undeniable eroticism of the work discomforts some viewers, but what Bernini was trying to portray is the eroticism of the soul experiencing the painful pleasure of an intense connection with God. He joined the physical and the spiritual in a way that is unforgettable.
Born in Naples in 1598, Gian Lorenzo Bernini was a child prodigy. His father was his first teacher, and he frequently found it necessary to admonish the young artist when he became so concentrated on his artistic studies that he neglected the childish pastimes that are always an essential part of growing up. Bernini’s favorite thing to do was visit the Vatican in order to sketch the classical statues and the paintings of his contemporaries. Here he learned to unite classical and Renaissance styles, studying the work of the ancient Greeks and artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael. Once, when sculpting a statue of St. Lawrence, who had been martyred by being burned alive, he thrust his own leg into a fire so that he could experience what that might have felt like in order to accurately portray the facial expression of the martyr.
Bernini’s talents were recognized early and progressed quickly. In short order he became a favorite of Pope Urban VIII, who appreciated the usefulness of his talents in decorating Rome. His life spanned the height of the Italian Baroque period, and his work can be seen as part of a response to the rise of the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church launched its own Counter-Reformation to reaffirm its power and attract followers by reformulating their theology and by sponsoring works of art that evoked the emotional power and authority of the Catholic faith. During his lifetime Bernini was embraced as a genius by his fellow artists and by the many rich patrons who sponsored his work, most especially by a series of popes for whom he created both sensuous sculptures and impressive architectural feats of wonder.
His sculptures are instantly recognizable for their dramatic theatricality and their sense of coiled tension. They appear as if their subjects have been caught mid-movement, with a dynamism wedded to a close observation of the smallest details, which he rendered with convincing naturalism. No other artist could so effectively evoke the softness of skin, the silky curls of hair, or the rustling of crinkling fabric as Bernini did. And as someone who also painted, Bernini knew how to deal with the way light and shadow played upon his subjects, and he carved in such a way as to accentuate those effects. As Joshua Reynolds once wrote, Bernini had the ability to make stone “sport and flutter in the air.”2 He brought this talent to such masterpieces as his own version of David (1623) hurling a stone at Goliath, Apollo and Daphne (1622–25), which convincingly captures a metamorphosis in progress, and St. Longinus (1638) at the very moment of his conversion as he perceives the divine light.
Detail of St. Teresa in Ecstasy by Bernini, Corona Chapel, Rome [© Sailko/Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-3.0]
Bernini was also a genius when it came to architecture, and among other achievements he was responsible for the great Vatican Colonnade in front of St. Peter’s (with its 284 columns arranged in a welcoming pattern, as though the church were opening its arms to receive worshipers into it), decorating the canopy for the throne of St. Peter inside St. Peter’s Basilica, and the allegorical Fountain of Four Rivers in the middle of the Piazza Navona.
Bernini was a man of deep spiritual devotion who spent a portion of every morning in prayer, and every evening he would attend vespers at a nearby Jesuit church. He saw his artistic work as a channel through which the grace of God might flow to others. Among the books that inspired him were Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ and Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.
Perhaps a key source of Bernini’s ability to create such believable and inspiring moments of spiritual experience in his work was his deep familiarity with the Spiritual Exercises. He carried a small copy of this book with him wherever he went, and he would regularly go on Ignatian retreats. The Spiritual Exercises teach a form of prayer whereby one imaginatively places oneself into a biblical story, engaging all the senses in prayer. One is encouraged to feel, smell, and fully experience what is happening in the biblical passage upon which one is meditating so that one might personally engage with it at the deepest emotional and spiritual level. Bernini clearly had honed his gift for such sympathetic imagination; with it he could enter into the emotions of others and convey supreme moments of religious experience.
There is an undeniable theatricality to Bernini’s works, which some might find off-putting. But such theatricality was not an accident. Bernini did not want to settle for the calm stoicism of so much of classical statuary. Instead, he wanted to invest his work with emotional power and intense drama. And the drama that he wanted to invoke was the drama that comes with spiritual experience, when the human soul is touched by God. He sought to externalize an interior state. In Bernini’s art we are often made witnesses to a mystical miracle, but it is a miracle grounded in realism through Bernini’s masterful skill and his penetrating observation of the human figure.