Ecstacy and Sacking

This morning was beeauuutiful so we took a dandy stroll up to the Quirinal Hill, where we stopped to visit the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria. The church was built during the 17th century and was dedicated to Saint Paul for the discalced Carmelites. Inside the church is a very baroque style like we have been often seeing in these past few weeks, but contained inside is one of Bernini's favorite works: St. Theresa in Ecstacy. In our readings for Art history we learned about how Bernini achieved Bel Composto in his master of sculpting, architecture, and painting. Although he did not do any paintings inside the chapel, his use of different colors of marble show his mastery of color. Everything from the iconography he used to the his strategy of architecture all come together to create the bel composto of St. Theresa.


There is speculation that her gesture and the gesture of the angel in between piercings to her heart are overtly sensual. However, our class came to the conclusion that it was not sensual, but in fact gestures of love and pain. The angel is looking at St. Theresa with understanding while in between spearings to her heart. Lisa read us a passage from St. Theresa where she explained her mystic experiences of ecstacy she had with God, it was painful to the spirit but not so much to the body. Here Bernini sculpts St. Theresa in the moments before her death, which occured during one of her mystic encounters with God.



After seeing this church, we then made the trek down to Trastevere, where we went to the second church of San Francesco a Ripa. The church was dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi, who visited and stayed in this area during his lifetime. One of the side chapels inside contains another work of Bernini's, The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, which was commissioned for much less money than St. Theresa but we thought was equally as beautiful, although simpler in design and extravagance. The sculpture itself is of a similar nature, however Ludovica is not on her deathbed, but rather simply experiencing a moment of ecstacy with God, with Seraphims surrounding her. Those guys in my opinion are scarier than the puti, I do NOT enjoy either of them and could honestly live forever without seeing another puti or seraphim.
In the afternoon we had class with Mary, and learned about about the sacking of Rome. Some interesting facts that we learned today in class was that during the first stages of war, the Germans did the right thing in killing everyone in sight when they first sacked Rome. But then the next step was not to kill the people right away, and instead try and figure out where the people were keeping their loot, so they could steal it away and keep it for themselves. From Giuccardini's The Sack of Rome, we also learned that venerable relics were found and thrown around the streets. The heads of the likes of St. Paul and St. Anne were kicked around like balls, that is not very nice! The lucky few in Rome got to retreat to Castel San Angelo, while it was said that others went to the Colonna palace.