#cornaro chapel

Making a leather bracer featuring an image from the Cornaro Chapel in Italy.

One day an angel appeared to me who was lovely beyond compare. I saw in his hand a long spear, the end of which looked like a point of fire. I felt it pierce my heart several times, pressing into my innermost being. So real was the pain to me that I moaned out loud several times, and yet it was so indescribably sweet that I could not wish to be released from it. No joy in life can give more satisfaction. When the angel withdrew his spear, I was filled with a great love of God. — St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

Image: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ecstacy of St. Teresa and Cornaro Chapel, 1647–1652

During the Renaissance, sacred art was often conceived as an appeal to the rational mind; it served as a subject for observation, contemplation, prayer and theological rumination. In contrast to these ideals, sacred art during the Baroque period was primed by the concerns of the Counter Reformation, an alarmed reaction to Protestantism which dictated that the Catholic Church use any means necessary to repel heresy and bring the faithful back into the fold. This often meant that sacred works of art were meant to be as overwhelming as possible; experienced rather than merely observed, evoking visionary, emotionally immersive experiences that existed in a realm beyond the collapse of reason or rationality, as in the ecstasies of saints. Working in this tradition, the Cornaro chapel is intended to dazzle and overwhelm the viewer with sensation, dissolving the boundaries between spectacle and spectator in a sensory barrage of theatrical beauty and illusion, designed to invoke a shared emotional response.

Bernini’s Ecstacy of St. Teresa, conceived as a multimedia experience within the Cornaro chapel, epitomizes this approach. The wall of the chapel seems to rip and buckle outward from the floor to the uppermost tip of the pediment, activating a dazzling variety of polychrome marbles, whose diverse patterns and elaborate inlays splash across the room in vibrating, undulating patterns, framing the saint and her accompanying angel inside an upswept explosion of light, color and outward-expanding energy. Above the altar the canopy swells as if bursting open from within, revealing the Ecstasy, illuminated by golden shafts of divine light. 

The saint’s body seems to defy naturalism and the rules of physics; anatomical clarity lost under an agitation of undulating drapery communicating a sense of suspension of the soul as the saint is overwhelmed with sensation, her feet arching, hands hanging limply in surrender. Caught up in a visionary state beyond the realm of ordinary reality, the saint’s head is thrown back in an expression of complete acceptance that blurs the line between sacred and sensual ecstasy, eyes rolling backward as her mouth falls open. In the beautiful face of the miraculously youthful St. Teresa, Bernini “sought to represent what the saint herself described as the unión mistica between God and herself, an ecstatic state attained by prayer.” St. Teresa referred to this ecstasy as her “transverberation,” writing of her sacred experiences in unabashedly sensual terms. The transverberation becomes the “point of contact between earth and heaven, between matter and spirit,” accentuated by the exuberance and dynamism of the total creation, in a complete immersion of color, form and light.