Which saint is it in this picture?

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DatGangstaStuff

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I almost feel silly asking this (I ought to know this), but I’ll go ahead.

Who is the saint in that famous picture who is being pierced by an angel- whilst she is enraptured in ecstasies?

Thank you.
 
DatGangstaStuff said:
I almost feel silly asking this (I ought to know this), but I’ll go ahead.

Who is the saint in that famous picture who is being pierced by an angel- whilst she is enraptured in ecstasies?

Thank you.
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Can you at least show us the picture?
 
Probably St Teresa of Avila. There is a very famous sculpture of her, with her heart being pireced by a spear.
It is often reproduced as a picture.
HTH
 
I don’t have a picture unfortunately, but I’ll look up St. Theresa of Avila- that sounds like it rings a bell.

I’m embarrased. I ought to know that.
 
I think this statue was mentioned in The Da Vinci Code. Or Angels and Demons, i’m not sure.
 
I took an Art History class a couple years ago. We studied this sculpture.

From Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, pp. 727-729:

“AN ECSTATIC AND RADIANT VISION Another Bernini sculpture that displays the expansive quality of Italian Baroque art and its refusal to limit itself to firmly defined spatial settings is** Ecstacy of Saint Theresa **in the Cornaro Chapel of the Roman church of Santa Maria della Vittoria. For this chapel, Bernini drew on the full resources of architecture, sculpture and painting to charge the entire area with dramatic tension. St Theresa was a nun of the Carmelite order and one of the great mystical saints of the Spanish Counter-Reformation. Her conversion occurred after the death of her father, when she fell into a series of trances, saw visions, heard voices. Feeling a persistent pain, she attributed it to the fire-tipped arrow of Divine Love that an angel had thrust repeatedly into her heart. In her writings, St Theresa described this experience as making her swoon in delightful anguish. The whole chapel became a theater for the production of this mystical drama. The niche in which it takes place appears as a shallow proscenium (the part of the stage in front of the curtain) crowned with a broken Baroque pediment and ornamented with polychrome marble. On either side of the chapel, relief-sculptured portraits of the Cornaro family behind draped praying desks attest to the piety of the patrons (Cardinal Federico Cornaro and his relatives) attending this heavenly drama. Bernini depicted the saint in ecstasy, unmistakably a mingling of spiritual and physical passion, swooning back on a cloud, while the smiling angel aims his arrow. The entire sculptural group is made of white marble, and Bernini’s supreme technical virtuosity is evident in the visual differentiation in texture among the clouds, rough monk’s cloth, gauzy material, smooth flesh, and feathery wings. Light from a hidden window of yellow glass pours down on the bronze rays that suggest the radiance of Heaven, whose painted representation covers the vault. (Hidden lights have been installed near the top of the rays to ensure visitors to the chapel a consistent viewing experience). The passionate drama of Bernini’s sculpture correlated with the ideas disseminated by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order and later canonized as St. Ignatius. In his book, Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius argued that the re-creation of spiritual experiences for viewers would do much to increase devotion and piety. Thus, theatrically and sensory impact were useful vehicles for achieving Counter-Reformation goals. Bernini was an extremely devout Catholic, which undoubtedly contributed to his understaning of those goals. His inventiveness, technical skill, sensitivity to his patrons’ needs, and energy account for his position as the quintessential Italian Baroque artist.”

Oh – it is St. Therea of Avila.

God Bless!
 
“I saw an angel beside me toward the left side, in bodily form…He was not very large, but small, very beautiful, his face so blazing with light that he seemed to be one of the very highest angels, who appear all on fire. They must be those they call Cherubim…I saw in his hands a long dart of gold, and at the end of the iron there seemed to me to be a little fire. This I thought he thrust through my heart several times, and that it reached my very entrails. As he withdrew it, I thought it brought them with it, and left me all burning with a great love of God. So great was the pain, that it made me give those moans; and so utter the sweetness that this sharpest of pains gave me, that there was no wanting it to stop, nor is there any contenting of the soul with less than God”. (St. Teresa, Life…Chapter 19).
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