17th century, Roman school

17th century, Roman school

Transverberation of Saint Teresa of Avila

Terracotta finished in slats, cm 40 x 30

Inscription in the bottom right "...Carm. Scalz..."

Catholic mysticism describes transverberation as a transplanting of the heart by means of a dart, arrow or spear, carried out by Christ or his angel emissary; the Latin transverberare, "to pierce", explains its sudden and furious mode, so much so that the event was taken from Christian literature also as an assault of the Seraph, already in itself being ardent in love for Christ, or wounded by love. Emblematic episode is the one narrated by Santa Teresa d'Avila in her own memories, assumed in the artistic iconography as a model for the representation of a moment so intimately and spiritually unfathomable; Among all, he obtained the greatest honor the image invented by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for the chapel Cornaro in Santa Maria della Vittoria Romana (1645). The work was translated into marble and gilded bronze, limited to the divine rays radiated from the sky, and conceived as the fulcrum of the edicola that hosts it, almost if it were a theatrical prologue, and the prayerful portraits of members of the Cornaro family were set in the boxes of an opera barcaccia. This perspective concept served to better direct the attention of the viewer, charging the emotional significance of the sculpture, in line with the spectacular Baroque dictates of Rome by Urban VIII Barberini (1623-44), Innocent X Pamphilj (1644-55) and Alexander VII Chigi (1655-66). Native to the city of Avila, in Spain, the life of Saint Teresa was just a century before the Bernini group -perhaps resulting from the Apparition of Christ to Santa Margherita da Cortona by Giovanni Lanfranco (1622), commissioned by Ferdinand II for the church of Santa Maria Nuova in Cortona and today in the collections of Palazzo Pitti. The early reading, in the company of her brother Rodrigo, of the Acta Martyrum led Teresa, a young girl, to reject the glamour that assured her the nobility of the family and to seek death dangerously among the infidels' Moors, so as to meet Jesus immediately. Scampatane thanks to the intervention of the family, he decided to retire and live in the garden of his house, in a small cell that already foreshadowed his dedication to the homestead. Once grown up, Teresa retired to the Monastery of the Incarnation on Mount Carmel (Avila), thus entering the Spanish Carmelite Order; later a serious illness attracted her to the paternal home. A timely vision made her come to her senses, convincing her to reform the Carmelite monasteries both male and female; she approached John of the Cross and founded in 1562 San Giuseppe, the first reformed monastery. Teresa was elected "mother of the spiritual", that is to say of all who went seeking union with God, and then proclaimed a saint (1622) and a doctor of the Church (1970). In the terracotta, patiently finished in batten in the deep draping of the capes of the figurants and in the swirling clouds that bring the angels to earth, two divine angels come for the touch of the dart and head of a small cherub on the still high clouds. The figurative moment can be understood doubly as the instant immediately preceding the piercing, in which the saint ecstatically welcomes the divine gift, assisted by the second angel who receives the emotion, on the basis of the Berninian experience, or the next moment, In which the arrow is retracted and the saint does not stand up to the otherworldly majesty. The work has an inscription on the lower right border, which with the words CARM. SCAL refers to the Order of Carmelite Barefoot, derived from the reform of the Carmelite Order (1562) promoted by St. Teresa.Jacopo Palma the Younger (1549-1628) had executed for the Roman Church of San Pancrazio outside the walls a Santa Teresa in which appear, as of the present, two angels with adult features and the Christ himself, from where the divine rays unfold. Later the Flemish William Borremans (1672-1744) renewed this iconography, painting in 1772 a much-loved Saint Teresa for the Church of Santa Teresa alla Kalsa. 

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