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Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Roman Baroque
built 186 days ago
During the reign of Innocent X, when Bernini was temporarily in disgrace, he created the Cornaro Chapel in the small Roman church of S. Maria della Vittoria (1644-1655). The central group in the chapel depicts the mystical vision of St. Theresa. The saint herself described how once, when she floated on air in ecstatic rapture, an angel appeared before her and plunged the golden arrow of Divine Love repeatedly into her heart.
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PAUL SOLMAN: Transformation might be the secular term for what Bernini did, transubstantiation the religious one--for historically, Bernini's art was the Catholic response to the Protestant reformation, using emotions at their most extreme to counter the austerity of Protestantism. It was called the counter-reformation and its heroes and heroines were Catholic saints caught by Bernini in the act of conversion. The blessed Mudavika Albertoni, ecstatically expiring as her soul ascends to heaven; Longinus, the Roman soldier who speared the crucified Christ, and in that instant recognized his divinity.
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Matteo Bonarelli had come to Rome from Lucca around 1636 and joined Bernini's workshop, where he had the usual details - angels and such-like - farmed out to him by the Cavaliere. His wife, Costanza, was... evidently no angel, nor especially constant. The affair between her and Bernini was apparently not his first, since Baldinucci writes of the romantic adventures, very much in the plural, of his youth. The "youth", however, was by now nearly 40, and his liaison with Costanza was obviously more than just a fling. He was, as his son Domenico candidly wrote, "fieramente inamorato" with her.
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Roman Baroque