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Alienata Da'sensi: Reframing Bernini's S. Teresa, Andrea Bolland

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa for the Cornaro Chapel (1647–52) is perhaps the artist’s most sensually charged creation, and the apparently physical nature of Teresa’s ecstasy is today even acknowledged in survey textbooks. Teresa herself opened the door to this reading when, in describing her spiritual ecstasy, she admitted that ‘the body doesn’t fail to share in some of it, and even a great deal’. Yet the balance between sense and spirit in the sculpture emerges somewhat differently if it is viewed (literally and figuratively) in context: as an altarpiece in a chapel where its presentation is structured …