Santa Maria della Vittoria

A baroque church with the bodacious Bernini set-piece of St. Theresa in Ecstasy marrying architecture and sculpture

The interior of this small church is one of Rome's most successful examples of unified baroque decoration, nicely restored in the early 1990s.

The star of the show is in the last chapel on the left—the Cappella Cornaro, or Cornaro Chapel—in which Bernini used full sculpture and optically tricky reliefs to turn the shallow chapel into a tiny opera house for his rendition of St. Theresa in Ecstasy.

Under a huge burst of gilded light rays, an angel bearing the arrow of religious enlightenment alights on a sea of clouds, cocking his head and looking down bemusedly at St. Theresa of Avila.

The saint in question is reclining in her voluminous robes, captured in the midst of a moment of religious ecstasy—though it looks as if Bernini used a rather more corporeal experience of ecstasy as his model.

The saint speaks for herself
The saint herself described the holy event in her autobiography:

"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..."
(Yes, this sculpture has always been seen as at least slightly scandalous—though no more so that the saint's own description of her moment of ecstasy. I defy anyone to read it—see the box on the right—and not find it just a wee bit racy.)

On either side of the chapel are “box seats" so that the members of the Cornaro family—who paid for the chapel— could look on as bas relief portraits. In the box on the chapel's left side, the half-hidden figure on the right end is said to be a self-portrait by Bernini.

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