Correspondent in Rome
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Saint Teresa of Jesus (1515-1582), the first woman doctor of the Church, has returned to Rome. The baroque masterpiece, ‘The ecstasy of Saint Teresa’, by the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, recently recovered its original splendor with a complete restoration. Romans and tourists who come to the Eternal City during the Christmas holidays can find it again in the Cornaro Chapel from the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, a place that offers not only an architectural and artistic representation, but also a very rich devotional symbolism.
Bernini, also an architect and excellent painter, designed and executed it between 1647 and 1653, in one of his highest moments of sublime creativity. The sculptor himself defined it, in a gesture of certain humility, as his “least bad work”, meaning that it was the best of his production.
Filippo BaldinucciAn art historian and contemporary of Bernini, wrote in the artist’s biography: “Bernini himself used to say that it was the best work that came out of his hand.”
Without a doubt, an extreme work, out of the ordinary, because he extracted something immaterial from Carrara marble: ecstasy (the Greek word for “being outside oneself”). Actually, for greater precision, the scene represents a transverberation, which is why the sculpture is sometimes also called ‘Transverberation of Santa Teresa de Ávila‘. The Saint herself described her mystical experience of being pierced in the heart, which “is not physical pain but spiritual pain”, a type of experience called in the Church as ‘the transverberation’.
Restoration
The importance of restoration sums it up like this Daniela porro, Special Superintendent of Rome: «The work of the restorers of the Gian Lorenzo Bernini monument is very important from many points of view. First, because it is an intervention that, after several decades, has affected not only sculpture, but also the Cornaro Chapel In its whole; secondly, because it was a unique opportunity to study and deepen the work, revealing details of the process of its realization that otherwise would have been very difficult to know.
For its part, Mariella Nuzzo, director of a phase of the restoration, has commented that “the relief scenes in stucco that represent episodes from the life of Saint Teresa, which seemed submerged in the mud, practically invisible before the intervention, have recovered all the delicate original gilding ». Thus, now the arch decorated with angels appears also clear where the Latin inscription ‘Unless I had created heaven, for yourself alone I would create‘(‘ If I had not created heaven, I would create it for you alone ‘, words that the Saint heard during one of her ecstasies).
Synthesis of total art
It was the cardinal Federico Cornaro the one who commissioned the artist to build his family’s chapel, due to Bernini’s qualities as an architect and sculptor. The master of the Baroque, a Neapolitan by birth (1598) and Roman by adoption (died 1680 in Rome), designed and produced this absolute baroque masterpiece. It is a composition that is, at the same time, a magnificent synthesis of total Baroque art, with a perfect fusion of architecture, sculpture, painting, decoration, scenery and artistic lighting, with the ‘theatricality’ characteristic of the Baroque. Members of the Cornaro family, comfortably seated in the boxes created in the chapel especially for them as if they were spectators of a theatrical performance, in this case showing amazement and lively devotional enthusiasm.
The same amazement and amazement also awakens today because of its beauty this universal masterpiece. Famous is the phrase that the philosopher and linguist Charles de Brosses -inventor of the term ‘fetishism’- he uttered while admiring her during his trip to Italy in 1739-1740: “If this is divine love, I know everything about it.”
In short, those who visit the Cornaro Chapel today to admire Bernini’s work on Santa Teresa assure that it has been a restoration of ‘ecstasy’.
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