![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
The Ecstasy of St. Teresa is arguably the most controversial work created by the Roman Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). The debate surrounding the statue centers on the question: did the artist’s radically non-traditional depiction of Teresa’s transverberation transgress the boundaries of decorum as understood by seventeenth-century Catholicism? This debate has lasted for many years and is likely to endure for many more to come, for, as the mass of, at times, contradictory documentation leads us to conclude, the line of decorum that Bernini did, or did not, cross would seem to resist any firm pinpointing, that is was, indeed, fluid and subjective, even when seen through seventeenth-century eyes. The aim of this article is not to deny the subjective fluidity of that line of decorum, but rather to propose that it was perhaps far less fluid and subjective than some examiners of the issue today seem inclined to believe. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, its aim is also to disabuse the staunch defenders of Bernini’s decorum of the belief that no matter where that line of decorum might have been located in the seventeenth century, there cannot possibly be any reasonable grounds for suggesting that Bernini may have crossed it. Defenses of Bernini’s decorum rest on three claims: (1) Bernini faithfully followed the literal description of Teresa’s transverberation as described by the saint herself; (2) the Church understood that mystical union often entailed erotic elements and thus had no problem with religious art depicting that reality; and (3) since there is no nudity in Bernini’s statue, it cannot be accused of violating decorum. Through detailed analysis of Roman Catholic catechetical teaching (from Augustine to Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino), Teresa’s writings and other primary texts relating to the saint’s transverberation, and an extremely close examination of the statue itself, this article argues that none of these defenses is completely accurate and thus unassailable in its conclusion, while, however, not claiming to resolve the decorum debate once and for all.
Notes
1 Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone, 7th ed. (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1898), 910, quoted by Walther Weibel, “The Representation of Ecstasy,” in Bernini in Perspective, ed. George Bauer (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1976), 77–89, at 77. The Council of Trent’s decree on art, “On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images,” was promulgated at Session 25 on December 3–4, 1563. All translations are my own, except where otherwise stated. I have supplied the original texts for sources for which there is no scholarly modern English translation.
2 Weibel’s pages on Bernini’s Teresa, in Walther Weibel, Jesuitismus und Barockskulptur in Rom (Strassburg: J.H.E. Heitz, 1909) (English translation in Bauer, Bernini in Perspective) represent the most influential of the modern defenses of the statue’s decorum. Weibel’s defense has been accepted and echoed by many scholars, one of whom describes it as “a pioneering attempt to historicize Bernini’s representations of ecstasy rather than judge them by anachronistic moral standards”; Morgan Currie, “Sanctified Presence: Sculpture and Sainthood in Early Modern Italy” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Art History and Architecture, Harvard University, 2014), 141 n. 412. Instead, I argue here that Weibel’s “historicization” leaves much to be desired in its understanding of orthodox Catholic thought on the issue in the early modern period. For other defenses of Bernini’s decorum, see Margaretta Salinger, “Representations of Saint Teresa,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 8, no. 3 (1949): 97–108, at 108: “Although Bernini showed the saint as a frail and delicately youthful figure, quite different from the sturdy, capable woman described by her biographers, his interpretation of the experiences adheres with the closest exactitude to Saint Teresa’s account of it, except that the angel appears on her right hand rather than her left, as she so explicitly stated”; Pietro Cannata, “Teresa di Gèsu: Iconografia,” Bibliotheca Sanctorum, 13 vols (Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII, Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1961–70), 12: 412–19, at 414; Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (New York: Morgan Library & Oxford University Press, 1980), 107–23; Saverio Sturm, L’architettura dei Carmelitani Scalzi in età barocca. La ‘Provincia Romana’: Lazio, Umbria e Marche (1597–1705) (Rome: Gangemi, 2015), 123; and Currie, “Sanctified Presence,” 141. In representing the views of Bernini’s “defenders,” I also have in mind the unpublished comments made at public presentations of my thesis at academic conferences.
3 Ann Sutherland Harris, Seventeenth-Century Art and Architecture (London: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005), 111: “Bernini evidently did not intend a lascivious interpretation as he covered Teresa’s body with layers of heavy drapery so that only her face, one limp hand, and her feet can be seen.”
4 Weibel, “Representation of Ecstasy,” 85: “The reproach of lasciviousness was, therefore, first made by later generations; but this invalidates it, since we can only judge the intentions of the artist with the eyes of his own time.”
5 Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Ottilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1976), 193–94 (29.19). Teresa was specifically speaking about the pain she felt, but the same remark, of course, is applicable to the whole of her experience.
6 Simon Schama, “Bernini: The Miracle Worker,” in The Power of Art (New York: Random House, 2009), 76–125, at 78.
7 For Augustine’s invention of original sin, see Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity (New York: Random House,1988), 98–126; and Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (New York: Norton, 2017), 81–119.
8 For modern editions in English of both commentaries, see Augustine of Hippo, On Genesis against the Manichees; and On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, trans. Roland J. Teske (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991).
9 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. and notes Peter Constantine (New York: Liveright, 2018), 227–28 (10.35).
10 Gregory the Great, Moral Reflections on the Book of Job, trans. Brian Kerns (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2014), 286–87 (21.II.4).
11 Ibid.
12 Biblia latina cum glossa ordinaria (Venice: Apud Iuntas, 1603), 93–94.
13 George Corbett, “Peraldus and Aquinas: Two Dominican Approaches to the Seven Capital Vices in the Christian Moral Life,” The Thomist 79, no. 3 (2015): 383–406, at 383–84.
14 Guilelmus Peraldus, Summa virtutuum ac vitiorum (Cologne: Boëtzeri, 1614), 207–98: Tomus primus, Tractatus tertius, “De temperantia,” Caput XVIII, “De temperantia delectationum secundum visum, auditum et olfactum.”
15 Ernest H. Wilkins, A History of Italian Literature, 2nd revd. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 133.
16 Bernardino of Siena, quoted in Franco Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 118. The original Italian text reads: “Se una donna di voi si spogliasse innuda, e fusse costà ritta […] a quanti uomini e donne credi che venisse tentazione? Io ti dico: solo per vedere, a molti e molti.” Bernardino of Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427 (Milan: Rusconi, 1989), 478–49.
17 Ibid.
18 Bernardino of Siena, De inspirationibus, in Opera omnia, 7 vols (Quaracchi: Collegio San Bonaventura, 1950–65), 6: 223–90, at 259: “Novi personam quae, dum contemplabatur humanitatem Christi pendentis in cruce (pudet dicere et horrendum est etiam cogitare), sensualiter et turpiter polluebatur et foedabatur; quod aperte praedicare discretum non reputo.” For a discussion of the larger context in which this passage is found, see Franco Mormando, “An Early Renaissance Guide for the Perplexed: Bernardino of Siena’s De inspirationibus,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Essays in the Religious Imagination, ed. John C. Hawley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 24–49, esp. 38–39; for a further discussion of the passage within the context of Baroque painting, see Franco Mormando, “Teaching the Faithful to Fly: Mary Magdalene and Peter in Baroque Italy,” in Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image, ed. Franco Mormando (Chestnut Hill: McMullen Museum of Art, 1999), 107–35, at 117–18.
19 For Bernardino on the total nudity of the crucified Christ, see Franco Mormando, “Nudus Nudum Christum Sequi: The Franciscans and Differing Interpretations of Male Nakedness in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” Fifteenth Century Studies 33 (2008): 171–97, at 179; in ibid., 190, n. 13, see the quotation from church historian Raymond Brown, who points out that the normal Roman practice was to crucify criminals naked. For the quotations regarding and further discussion of “the ancient fathers” on the need for modesty in depicting the Crucifixion in art, see Giovanni Andrea Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters, ed. and trans. Michael Bury, Lucinda Byatt, and Carol M. Richardson (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2018), 231. In discussing the question “Was Christ crucified totally naked?” in his influential De historia sanctarum imaginum et picturarum (Book 4, Chap. 4), Johannes Molanus admits that there is indeed evidence in church tradition indicating that Jesus was believed to have been crucified naked, but still instructs readers that art should not depict him thus for modesty’s sake, citing the “pious belief” that it is inconceivable that Jesus, who foresaw and willingly gave himself to his Passion and death, would have permitted his crucifixion to be carried out in complete nakedness, knowing that “his most chaste mother and other holy women” would be there present; Johannus Molanus, Historia sanctarum imaginum et picturarum (Lyons: Laurentius Durand, 1619), 476–481, at 481, for the “pious belief” quotation; for more on Molanus and his treatise, see below. The later Spanish artist and treatise writer Francisco Pacheco states confidently that Jesus was not crucified naked: citing based on Matthew 7:31 and Mark 15:20 (“they took off the cloak from him and put on him his own garments and led him away to crucify him”), he says that the crucified Christ was wearing two garments, “the belted seamless tunic that, as we have said, was made by his most Holy Mother when he was a child, and he had worn ever since, and the mantle that the Hebrews wore. And these were the two garments that his executioners divided amongst themselves after the crucifixion”; Francisco Pacheco, On Christian Iconography: Selections from the Art of Painting [1649], trans. Carles Gutiérrez-Sanfeliu and José Solís de los Santos, intro. Jeremy Roe (Philadelphia: St. Joseph’s University Press, 2017), 168–69.
20 Peter Harrison, “Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 2 (2002): 239–59, at 243.
21 For the history behind the Tridentine decree on religious art, see John O’Malley, “Trent, Sacred Images, and Catholics’ Senses of the Senses,” in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 28–48.
22 Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848), 235–36.
23 Gabriele Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. William McCuaig (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 250.
24 For the publication history and influence of the Molanus treatise, see David Freedberg, “Johannes Molanus on Provocative Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 34 (1971): 229–36, at 229–30.
25 For the measures taken by Clement and Rusticucci, see Miguel Battilori, “La regolata iconografia della Controriforma nella Roma del Cinquecento,” Ricerche per la storia religiosa di Roma, 2 (1978): 11–50; Diego Beggiao, La visita pastorale di Clemente VIII (1592–1600). Aspetti di riforma post-Tridentina a Roma (Rome: Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1978), esp. appx 4 for the text of Rusticucci’s edict; and Opher Mansour, “Censure and Censorship in Rome, ca. 1600: The Visitation of Clement VIII and the Visual Arts,” in Hall and Cooper, Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, 136–60.
26 For the criticism of Pulzone’s Lamentation in the Clementine visitation report, see Mansour, “Censure and Censorship,” 146–47. For Paleotti’s and Gilio’s criticisms, see Mormando, “Teaching the Faithful to Fly,” 114.
27 These cases can be readily found in any of the scholarly studies on Caravaggio.
28 For this congregation, see Niccolò Del Re, La Curia romana. Lineamenti storicogiuridici, 3rd ed. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1970), 149–62, 525–26. Much later it was renamed the “Congregazione per il Clero,” overseeing only matters of clerical discipline, which in any event were the center of its attention from the very beginning.
29 For Innocent XI’s “campaign against nudity,” see the various contemporary avvisi di Roma, in Ermete Rossi, “Roma ignorata,” Roma 19 (1941), 307–08, 535–37, at 535–57. Rossi also prints another avviso (dated August 13, 1678) about Pope Innocent’s warning to Prince Borghese to remove the lascivious paintings in his “Galleria” lest they lead viewers into the sin of lust: “Si discorre che S. S.tà habbi fatto intendere al Prencipe Borghese di non lasciar veder le pitture lascive, che sono nella sua Galleria dell’appartamento terrreno per non incitar la lusuria à quelli che visitano le medesime”; ibid., 308. For Innocent’s order for the draping of Bernini’s allegorical figure on Alexander’s tomb, see Franco Mormando, Domenico Bernini’s “Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini:” An English Translation and Critical Edition with Introduction and Commentary (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011), 225.
30 Specchio di Roma Barocca, ed. Joseph Connors and Louise Rice, trans. Benedetta Origo Crea, 2nd revd. ed. (Rome: dell’Elefante, 1991), 111–12, for notice of both Capponi’s treatise and Cardinal Bona’s petition. The authoritative list of Capponi’s writings confirms the existence of Capponi’s treatise; Giovanni Fantuzzi, Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi, 9 vols (Bologna: Stamperia di San Tommaso D’Aquino, 1783), 1: 89.
31 For Lapide’s work as the “universal commentary,” see F. J. Creehan, “The Bible in the Roman Catholic Church from Trent to the Present Day,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day, ed. S. L. Greenslade, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 199–237, at 216.
32 For Oliva’s career and published sermons, see Franco Mormando, “Gian Paolo Oliva: The Forgotten Celebrity of Baroque Rome,” in The Holy Name. Art of the Gesù: Bernini and His Age, ed. Linda Wolk-Simon (Philadelphia: St. Joseph’s University Press, 2018), 185–224, at 187–94.
33 The quotation about Eve’s fall comes from Gian Paolo Oliva, Sermoni domestici detti privatamente, 2 vols (Venice: Zaccaria Conzatti, 1712), 1: 316, sermon 27: “Nella vigilia del Beato Luigi:” “[C]on esattissma custodia de’ sensi, si tenga lontana la tentatione dall’anima. Negligente in ciò Eva, perche vide, mangiò, e cadde.” For the image of the spark of lust becoming a conflagration, see the same sermon, 322, para. 41. For more on the same subject by Oliva, see, for example, his Quaranta sermoni detti in varii luoghi sacri di Roma (Rome: Varese, 1670), 707–09, para. 419–20 (sermon on St. Filippo Neri).
34 The belief that only “weak minds” would be susceptible to danger from sensualized art (and hence should not be a reason to impose strictures upon the freedom of artists) is voiced in various treatises on artistic decorum: for example, see Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors, 183, n. 298; it is also mentioned in Connors and Rice, Specchio di Roma barocca, 111.
35 For further information on the topic, see Thomas Santa Maria, “The Senses and their Custody in the Sermons and Spiritual Writings of Robert Bellarmine” (Master’s of Sacred Theology diss., School of Theology and Ministry, Boston College, 2016).
36 Roberto Bellarmino, De arte bene moriendi (Rome: Zannetti, 1620 ed.), 175–76 (I.16).
37 Sforza Pallavicino, Del bene [1644] (Naples: A. Bulifon, 1681 ed.), 424 (3.2.50): “Il dimostrano con buona, e con rea operazione, e le divote lagrime, che spesso traggon dagli occhi alle persone spirituali i ben formati ritratti del tormentato Redentore, e le fiamme pestilenti, che sono accese ne’ petti giovanili dalle immagini oscene, le quali con obbrobio dell’umana sfacciataggine tal’ora pagansi gran danaro per esser mantici della sopita lascivia: comperandosi, come prezioso, il desiderio medesimo di peccare.”
38 Joris van Gastel, “Ambiguities of the Flesh: Touch and Arousal in Italian Baroque Sculpture,” in Magische Bilder: Techniken der Verzauberung in der Kunst vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Uwe Fleckner and Iris Wenderholm (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 161–81, at 169–70. Note, however, that the translation provided by van Gastel is not literal: he substitutes Pallavicino’s unambiguous metaphor of sensual images as “bellows” inciting flames with, instead, that of “doormen” opening doors, thus eliminating the author’s adherence to the traditional and more emotionally charged “inflammatory” vocabulary used to describe the grave sin of lust.
39 Maffeo Barberini (Pope Urban VIII), Poesie toscane del card. Maffeo Barberino hoggi papa Urbano ottavo (Rome: Stamperia della Reverenda Camera Apostolica, 1640), sonnet 49: “Mortal bellezza ascoso il foco tiene / Per assarlir chi’l guardo non reprime: / Ahi mentre cauto à terra non l’adime, / Ratto l’ardorgli scorre entro le vene. / Ch’è varco l’occhio al cor, onde sen viene / L’imagin dell’oggetto, e vi s’imprime. / Se dunque sia, che sua salute stime, / Schivi mirar là dove non conviene.”
40 Massimo Petrocchi, Roma nel Seicento (Bologna: Cappelli, 1976), 97, n. 77. Petrocchi is not explicit about the date here in question; it appears to have been 1625.
41 For the influence of the Collaert-Galle images, see Sandra Costa Saldanha, “Theresian Iconography [in] the Convent of the Holy Heart of Jesus in Lisbon,” Cultura: Revista de História e Teoria das Ideias 21 (2005): 101–26, consulted in its unpaginated online edition, https://doi.org/10.4000/cultura.3041 (accessed on July 13, 2020), in which see para. 24; and Carlos Eire, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 137–40.
42 The painting was later moved to the Basilica of San Pancrazio, where it is currently located. Recent restoration of the altarpiece revealed the date, 1615, painted on the canvas, thus likely making it the very first public altarpiece dedicated to Teresa in Rome (Pamela Jones, personal communication, February 27, 2021). For further discussion of the altarpiece, see Pavel Kalina, “Mystics and Politics: Bernini’s Transverberation of St Teresa and its Political Meaning,” Sculpture Journal 27, no. 2 (2018): 193–204, at 198–99. Palma also created an engraving based upon the same altarpiece, used in an illustrated life of the saint, which can be viewed at https://coelifluus.wordpress.com/2016/08/27/proper-preface-of-saint-teresa-in-the-carmelite-missal/ (accessed January 5, 2023).
43 Pavel Kalina suggests that the altarpiece “could have inspired Bernini, who perhaps wanted to compete with a work he must have known well”; Kalina, “Mystics and Politics,” 198–99.
44 Of near identical composition (minus the altar rail) is the engraving by Karel van Mallery (1571–1635), reproduced by Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, fig. 263. As for the presence of God the Father, Jesus, and the other angels that we see in visual representations of the transverberation, Teresa makes no mention of their presence in her autobiography: their inclusion in the works of art in question may thus not only be a means of further solemnizing the scene but also, I would argue, of safeguarding its decorum through the addition of multiple, holy eyewitnesses to the event.
45 Bernini’s portrait drawing of Mascardi, fully and exquisitely executed, is now in the collection of the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Inv. no. EBA.435.
46 Agostino Mascardi, “Nella Canonizatione di Santa Teresa, recitata nella Chiesa di Sant’Anna in Genoua. Oratione 7,” in Prose vulgari. Seconda parte continente l’orationi (Venice: Bartolomeo Fontana, 1625), 129–44, at 140: “E qual profane seminator di menzogne mi và hora scioccamente rammemorando quell’arciero Cupido, che non dal Chaos, come Hesiodo sognò, ma dalla confusione degli humani pensieri originato, vien dipinto con l’arco d’oro, e con le faci? Non è, non è, Signori, questo bugiardo Nume sagittario de’ cuori, ma la viltà de mortali, che nell’otio partorisce, e co’l lusso và nutricando le sue voglie malnate, doppiamente sacrilege, con gli honori della divinità cuopre l’infamia de’ suoi sozzi piaceri […].” In a second, extremely idiosyncratic, engraved rendition of the transverberation (later than that depicted in ), Anton Wierix depicts the boy Jesus (actively assisted by his parents, Mary and Joseph) in the unmistakable guise of Cupid the Archer: the first of Jesus’s arrows has already pierced the heart of Teresa, who is shown reeling backwards from a kneeling position, all this taking place not in a chapel but in an open field and witnessed from above by God the Father, the Holy Spirit, and a host of angels. However, despite the profane evocation, Wierix carefully de-eroticizes the scene: completely cloaked under the heavy, immobile mantel of her secured fastened habit, Teresa is expressionless with her mouth tightly close. For this Wierix engraving, see Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, fig. 278; and Eire, Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, .
47 Among the various discussions of this alternate framing, see, for example, Hans Kauffmann, Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini: Die figürlichen Kompositionen (Berlin: Mann, 1970), 144–62; and Claudia Lehmann, Un pien teatro di meraviglie: Gian Lorenzo Bernini vor dem Hintergrund konzeptistischer Emblematik (Bern: Lang, 2010), 122–35.
48 Salinger, “Representations of Saint Teresa,” 108; Sturm, L’architettura dei Carmelitani Scalzi, 123: “venato di sensuale misticismo senza tuttavia correre alcun rischio di distaccarsi dall’ortodossia agiografica del cattolicesimo romano.” Sturm prefaces his assertion repeating the conventional defense of Bernini, that is, that he based the “realismo” of his sculpture “directly upon Teresa’s own authentic autobiographical writings” (“direttamente sugli autografi autobiografici di Teresa”).
49 Teresa of Avila, Book of Her Life, 193 (29.13): “The Lord wanted me while in this state to see sometimes the following vision” (emphasis added).
50 Francisco de Ribera, La vita della S. Madre Teresa di Giesu (Naples: Costantino Vitale, 1622), 211 (4.1).
51 Ribera, Vita della S. Madre Teresa, 37 (1.10) for the transverberations. We now know that the first transverberation seems to have occurred around 1559; Maria Berbara, “‘Esta pena tan sabrosa’: Teresa of Avila and the Figurative Arts in Early Modern Europe,” in The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture, ed. Jan Frans van Dijkhuisen and Karl A. E. Enenkel (Boston: Brill, 2009), 267–98, at 278.
52 Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, 112.
53 Federico Borromeo, Sacred Painting [and] Museum, ed. and trans. Kenneth S. Rothwell, Jr., intro. and notes Pamela Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 12 (1.4), 27 (1.8).
54 Ibid., 53 (1.12).
55 Franco Mormando, Bernini: His Life and His Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 164.
56 Teresa of Avila, “The Constitutions,” in The Book of Her Foundations [and] Minor Works, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Ottilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1985), 443–54, at 322, para. 12.
57 Ribera, Vita della S. Madre Teresa, 212 (4.1).
58 Teresa of Avila, “The Constitutions,” 322, para. 12 (emphasis added).
59 Pacheco, On Christian Iconography, 46 (2.2).
60 The first to depict Teresa barefoot seems to have been Parisian publisher–engraver Jacques Honervogt (Jacob Honervogt or Honnervogt, c.1623–c.1694) in his frontispiece for the oft-reissued Compendio della vita della serafica vergine S. Teresa di Giesu (1647 and further editions); Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, fig. 287. Honervogt (born of a German father of the same name) also depicts her, again seemingly for the first time, in the aftermath of the transverberation, reclining on the ground as if she had fainted, supported by an angel with a cloud of heavenly witnesses above. As for the Compendio, it circulated anonymously in the seventeenth century but in a later century its author was identified as Fra Alessio della Passione.
61 In the extant terracotta modello by Bernini of the statue in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (), the left foot is now missing, having broken off at some point over the centuries (Anthony Sigel, personal communication, August 14, 2020). Lavin has suggested that the prominent attention given by Bernini to Teresa’s feet was a pious reference to the relic of the saint’s foot that was held and venerated at the Roman Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala; Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, 110, n. 10. This may very well have been the case, but why was it necessary to depict her feet utterly shorn of all covering?
62 Weibel, “Representation of Ecstasy,” 84.
63 In the traditional habit of many female orders (though not the Carmelites), the forehead is also bound with a separate covering, the bandeau.
64 Under grave suspicion of heresy, “Teresa was forced to write the Vida because various authorities in her order and in the Catholic Church wanted to examine her prayer life and her mystical claims in detail”; Eire, Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, 34.
65 Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, 121–22.
66 Rudolf Preimesberger, “Berninis Cappella Cornaro: Eine Bild-Wort-Synthese des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts?,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 49, no. 2 (1986): 190–219.
67 The painting, commissioned for San Luigi dei Francesi, must have been executed during the artist’s brief Roman stay (c.1616–21) and remained there until the end of the eighteenth century when it was transferred to what is today’s Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte and then subsequently at some later date to the Church of St. Eustache in Paris, where it hangs to this day; Alessandro Bagnoli, Rutilio Manetti, 1571–1639, exh. cat. (Florence: Centro Di, 1978), 111, cat. 44. Manetti’s scene must have been popular for there are two extant autograph copies, one in the Pitti Palace, Florence (general cat. no. 00745826) and another in a private collection (according to the Web Gallery of Art; https://www.wga.hu/html_m/m/manetti/ecstasy.html (accessed January 3, 2023).
68 Anon., “Constantine Brought to the Pillory” (Il Costantino messo alla berlina; Rome, c.1679), Vatican Library, Chigi I.VII.270, fol. 133–45. English trans. in Bauer, Bernini in Perspective, 46–53, at 53. For a new, unabridged edition of the original Italian text, see Tomaso Montanari, La libertà di Bernini. La sovranità dell’artista e le regole del potere (Turin: Einaudi, 2016), 304–18, who also corrects the longstanding scholarly error that had dated the text to 1725.
69 George Mather, The Psychology of Visual Art: Eye, Brain and Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 53.
70 Joshua C. Taylor, Learning to Look: A Handbook for the Visual Arts, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 153.
71 Quoted in Joris van Gastel, Il Marmo Spirante: Sculpture and Experience in Seventeenth-Century Rome (Berlin: Brill, 2013), 206.
72 Maria H. Loh, “‘La custodia degli occhi’: Disciplining Desire in Post-Tridentine Italian Art,” in Hall and Cooper, Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, 91–112, at 95–96.
73 Maurizio and Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco, Bernini. Una introduzione al gran teatro del Barocco (Rome: Bulzoni, 1967), 261; Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, 123. They cite as model for Bernini not Cupid and the Reclining Venus but rather Danaë and the Shower of Gold. Lavin also explicitly acknowledges Bernini’s eroticization of the scene in general, but, again, seems to refuse to problematize it; Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, 212, 123.
74 The entry, as cited by Francesco Petrucci, reads: “so stato […] a la Vittoria, ove è il lavoro del C. Bernino”; Francesco Petrucci, “Bernini, Algardi, Cortona ed altri artisti nel diario di Fabio Chigi cardinale (1652–1655),” Rivista dell’Istituto Nazionale d’Archeologia e Storia dell’arte 53 (III Serie, XXI, 1998): 169–96, at 184. Petrucci does not include the date of the entry; it seems to have been 1652; in any case, the diary covers only the period 1652–55.
75 For dissimulation in Bernini’s Rome, see Mormando, Bernini: His Life and His Rome, 36–38; for the warning to Ferrante Pallavicino about the dangers of criticizing the rich and powerful (contained in a letter from Antonio Lupis, another popular author of the time), see ibid., 51.
76 As is pointed out by Tomaso Montanari, “A Contemporary Reading of Bernini’s ‘Meraviglioso Composto’: Unpublished Poems on the Four River Fountain and the Cornaro Chapel,” in Poetry on Art: Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Thomas Frangenberg (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2003), 177–98, at 180.
77 “Inde tibi multisque dabit, te auctore, beatam / E saxo mentem, cum qui se dulce propinat / Divinum mirumque bibet spectator amorem”; quoted in Montanari, “Contemporary Reading,” 194, from poem IX, which begins “Exanimes artus animat, iam numine plenos.”
78 For detailed discussion of this case, see Marina Caffiero, Forced Baptisms: Histories of Jews, Christians, and Converts in Papal Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 214–21.
79 For the avviso on Bernini’s St. Teresa and Passeri’s praise of the statue, see Mormando, Bernini: His Life and His Rome, 159. For the anonymous Frenchman’s praise, see Connors and Rice, Specchio di Roma barocca, 132.
80 The citation of this text as contradiction comes from Joseph Connors (personal communication, April 11, 2021). For the social–intellectual profile of the French author, see the editors’ “Introduction,” in Specchio di Roma barocca, xiii–xv.
81 For the condemnation of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and the St. Catherine altarpiece, see Connors and Rice, Specchio di Roma barocca, 32–33, 109–10, respectively. The “scandalous” altarpiece—probably a “Mystical Marriage” scene—is no longer in the church, whose decor underwent a major renovation in the eighteenth century; the most detailed historical description of the church makes no mention of it; Mario Bevilacqua, Santa Caterina da Siena a Magnanapoli. Arte e storia di una comunità religiosa romana nell’età della Controriforma (Rome: Gangemi, 1993). It is in condemning the altarpiece that the author of the Specchio cites verbatim the text of the Tridentine decree on decorum in art: “Auprès du grand autel est un grand tableau de St. Catherine à laquelle Nostre Seigneur encore jeune apparoit. On souhaitteroit qu’en ce tableau, comme en beaucoup d’autres semblables, on se fust estudié d’avantage de n’y rien faire entrer de contraire à l’honnesteté et à la pudeur, et qu’on se fut souvenu de ces paroles du Concile de Trente, omnis lascivia vitetur ita ut procaci venustate imagines non pingantur nec ornentur, Sess. 25. Quelqu’aguer[r]is que les Italiens soient sur cela, on ne scait que trop quel est l’effet que la veue de ces tableaux, que les lieux saints où ils sont leur permet de regarder, fait dans leur esprit. Je n’ya point vû d’estrangers qui n’en ayent esté scandalisés. Et l’on ne peut ne se pas plaindre de l’indifference qu’on a d’empescher sur cela la liberté extravagante et ridicule que les peintres se donnent en dessignant trop impudemment les sujets les plus saints[…].”
82 Instead, in his treatise Ottonelli actually inserts a word of praise for Annibale as the author of renowned religious paintings and “the celebrated gallery of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome”; Joseph Connors, “Chi era Ottonelli?,” in Pietro da Cortona. Atti del convegno internazionale Roma–Firenze 12–15 novembre 1997, ed. Christolph Luitpold Frommel and Sebastian Schütze (Milan: Electa, 1997), 29–35, at 32; my translation. As Connors explains (in an article that is indispensable for any proper understanding of Ottonelli’s treatise), in reality the Jesuit was deceived by his artistic consultant, Pietro da Cortona, whose hidden agenda in agreeing to serve as consultant was the moderation, if not subversion, of the author’s more extreme censorious aims. More than once, Cortona “ably manipulated the Jesuit into praising pictures he had never seen”; ibid., 32; my translation. Hence, we must not take at face value certain of Ottonelli’s positive judgments of works of art which many other post-Tridentine treatise writers would have probably deemed of dubious religious respectability.
83 Connors and Rice, Specchio di Roma barocca, 47: “Carrache s’est surpassé dans cette gallerie de Farnèse, quelques indécence qu’il ait laissé[e] dans quelques endroits.”
84 Ibid., 132: “La chapelle de la croisée qui est à main gauche est un des beaux ouvrages du Cavalier Bernin. On y voit les portraits de six cardinaux de la famille des Cornaro et surtout la figure de Ste. Thérèse, qui, de frayeur qu’elle a de voir un ange qui luy apparoist, se jette de dessus son grabat avec une action qui exprime si bien sa frayeur et en mesme temps quelque chose qui la rassure, qu’on ne peut rien voir de plus naturel et de plus achevé. Ce grand homme a surtout sceu prendre son jour avec tant d’artifice et d’adresse, qu’ayant fair percer l’église dans cet endroit, il semble que ce soit une ouverture par où l’ange soit déscendu […].”
85 Ibid., 152–53, in the entry on the Villa Ludovisi which then housed Bernini’s Pluto and Proserpina: “Il est vray que les ouvrages de ce grand homme approchent si fort de la diligence et de la beauté de ceux qu’on a des meilleurs maistres de tous les siècles, que quelques-uns mesmes ajoutent qu’exceptés certains miracles de l’art, come seroit le Laocoon et le Dircé, etc., le Bernin peut faire entrer plusieurs de ses ouvrages au rang des autres antiques dont on fait tous les jours l’éloge.”
86 For the names and dates of the Cornaro family members, see Sturm, L’architettura dei Carmelitani Scalzi, 120.
87 Another of his factual errors is his attribution to Bernini of the design of one of the chapels of the same church of Santa Caterina in Magnanapoli; Connors and Rice, Specchio di Roma barocca, 109. Bernini contributed no work of art or architecture to that church.
88 For the Carmelite dedicatory letter to Cornaro, see Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, 82–84. The letter was dedicating to the cardinal an Italian translation of a Spanish volume on mental prayer.
89 William L. Barcham, Grand in Design: The Life and Career of Federico Cornaro, Prince of the Church, Patriarch of Venice and Patron of the Arts (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, 2001), 352.
90 The original texts are, respectively: stanza 21, “prostrata in terra umile”; stanza 24, “Sù tempie giovinette / Le chiome innanellate ei scioglie accese; / Abbagliator cortese/ Fere gli occhi, arde l’alme, alletta i seni,/ Sparge odor, spira amor, spunta Sereni”; and in the same stanza, “Punge il guardo, apre il petto, il cor colpisce.” Giovanni Vincenzo Imperiali, La Santa Teresa (Venice: Evangelista Deuchino, 1622), 11 and 12.
91 Jonathan Unglaub, “‘Amorosa contemplatione’: Bernini, Bruni, and the Poetic Vision of Saint Teresa,” Art Bulletin 102, no. 2 (2020), 32–63, at 35.
92 For the most recent histories of the building and decorating of the Cornaro chapel, see Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, 107–24; William L. Barcham, “Some New Documents on Federico Cornaro’s Two Chapels in Rome,” Burlington Magazine 135, no. 1089 (December 1993): 821–22; Caterina Napoleone, “Bernini e il cantiere della Cappella Cornaro,” Antologia di Belle Arti 55–58 (1998): 172–86; Livia Carloni, “La Cappella Cornaro in Santa Maria della Vittoria: Nuove evidenze e acquisizioni sulla ‘men cattiva opera’ del Bernini,” in Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Regista del Barocco. I restauri, ed. Claudio Strinati and Maria Grazia Bernardini (Milan: Skira, 1999), 37–46; Barcham, Grand in Design, 328–87; and Sturm, L’architettura dei Carmelitani Scalzi, 116–24.
93 Barcham, Grand in Design, 346–47; for the investigations into the scandal-ridden seminary, see ibid., 344–49.
94 Franco Mormando, Domenico Bernini’s “Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” 158.
95 Kalina, “Mystics and Politics,” 193: “The purchase of this common view [that Cornaro’s devotion to Teresa began early in his career] together with the well-deserved authority of Lavin’s monograph [Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts] has meant that some authors continue to adhere to this thesis […].” Kalina’s note 3 gives a list of some of the authors in question.
96 Barcham, Grand in Design, 331, 348. For an explicitly political explanation of Cornaro’s commission—i.e. his desire to ingratiate himself further with the Spanish Hapsburgs—see Kalina, “Mystics and Politics.”
97 Barcham, Grand in Design, 355, 360, for the “zelantissimo” quotation; Barcham, “Some New Documents,” 822, for the “Venetian politician” quotation.
98 – Napoleone, “Bernini e il cantiere della Cappella Cornaro,” 174; for the same conclusion, see Barcham, “Some New Documents,” 821–22.
99 Barcham, Grand in Design, 244.
100 For a summary of the bell tower fiasco, see Mormando, Bernini: His Life and His Rome, 150–54, passim.
101 For the competition among Roman religious orders to attract crowds of pilgrims, tourists, and the ordinary faithful into their churches—necessary for the economic survival of both the buildings and the orders themselves—see Mormando, “Gian Paolo Oliva,” 200–01.