Ecstasy of Saint Teresa - Interpretations

Interpretations

The effects are theatrical, the Cornaro family seeming to observe the scene from their boxes, and the chapel illustrates a moment where divinity intrudes on an earthly body. Caroline Babcock speaks of Bernini's melding of sensual and spiritual pleasure in the "orgiastic" grouping as both intentional and influential on artists and writers of the day. Irving Lavin said "the transverberation becomes a point of contact between earth and heaven, between matter and spirit".

Given the sexualized imagery of St. Teresa's written account of the experience, some critics have seen in the statue a depiction of physical orgasm; in particular, the body posture and facial expression of St. Teresa have caused some to assign her experience as one of climactic moment. Jacques Lacan, for example, whilst discussing the female orgasm, said that "you only have to go and look at Bernini's statue in Rome to understand immediately that she's coming, there is no doubt about it." ("Encore," Sem. XX: 70-71) However, this sexual reading of the sculpture is not merely a modern, post-Christian, desacralizing view of Bernini's work: the sexual charge of the statue was noticed and condemned by at least one of Bernini's contemporaries (identity unknown), remarking that Bernini had "dragged that most pure Virgin down to the ground," while "transforming her into a Venus who was not only prostrate, but prostituted as well." In his oration on Teresa's transverberation, Bernini's scholarly contemporary and friend, Agostino Mascardi, acknowledges in condemnatory fashion that there were those in his own day who indeed projected the sexual filth of their own profane imaginations unto the saint's mystical experience.

Robert Harbison, however, has expressed his doubt that Bernini, a follower of the mystical exercises of followers of St. Ignatius of Loyola, would have intended to depict here an episode of lust fulfilled and proposes that instead, Bernini aims to express the facial and body equivalents of a state of divine joy: "It is an astonishing passage that the post-Freudian reader cannot help sniggering at—doesn't the nun realize she is describing mainly sexual longings? Indeed, a few lines later she recognizes that it is like bodily seduction, but only as an opening or avenue for another kind of experience. Human sexuality or even the senses cannot have the primacy for Teresa or Bernini which they do for us. The shocking reciprocal movement which grabs our attention so forcibly is not intended as sensational; it aims to jar us into another place entirely."