The Sculptural Iconography of Feminine Jouissance: Lacan’s Reading of Bernini’s Saint Teresa in Ecstasy

A swoon so sweetShould have eternal guise;But since suffering does not riseTo the Heavenly PortalBernini in this stone made it immortal.

Pietro Filippo Bernini, on his father’s Saint Teresa

Ecstasy in the chapel

Amongst the innumerable architectural splendors of Rome, the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, in the Sallustiano area of the city, is an unusually modest example of early 17^th century Baroque design. Situated on a street corner, and hemmed in by adjacent buildings at the back and to the right, anyone approaching the edifice from the Piazza di San Bernardo will be less than impressed by how the whole of its left side is but a plain terracotta rendered wall, with no artistic features other than a rectangular stained glass window above a small oriel. For the church’s travertine façade, Giovanni Battista Soria took inspiration from Carlo Maderno’s design for the façade of the nearby church of Santa Susanna, yet it does not incorporate the latter’s rich decorations and is far more restrained in its use of figurative sculpture. And so nothing in this rather unassuming exterior can prepare visitors for the sumptuous spectacle inside. From the resplendent cantoria on the counterfaçade to the frescoed dome, from the lavish nave to the eight ornate side-chapels, each and every part of the small church bathes in the glory of Baroque prodigality. Even the nave’s monumental Corinthian pilasters of coloured marble, with their gilded capitals in support of a richly exaggerated entablature, exude a sensation of grandeur, and contribute integrally to the overwhelming visual extravaganza.

For all its aggregate magnificence, many people would probably not be drawn to the church were it not for one particular sculpture, Saint Teresa in Ecstasy by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), which Simon Schama has dubbed “the most astounding peepshow in art” (78). Released from a single slab of white Carrara marble, the sculpture is the centerpiece of the large funerary chapel to the left of the church’s transept. The chapel was commissioned in January 1647 by the wealthy Venetian Cardinal Federico Cornaro (1579–1653) for the staggering amount of some 12,000 silver papal scudi, in honour of his esteemed family members and of his admired Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), the Spanish mystic who had been canonized by Pope Gregory XV twenty-five years earlier.¹ It took Bernini and his associates five years to complete the work, but when it was finally unveiled in the Summer of 1652 Roman public opinion echoed Cornaro’s own view that the highly theatrical combination of sculpture, painting and architecture had resulted in a timeless masterpiece—a bel composto of sublime beauty.² The widespread acclaim could probably have been predicted, because it is hard to believe that Bernini would have been prepared to take serious artistic risks in conceiving the chapel, in which case he would not only have been in danger of offending his generous patron, but also of undermining his own stellar reputation within the ecclesiastical hierarchy, both within the Vatican and further afield, and any additional commissions that may have stemmed from it.

For almost four centuries, a plethora of historians, art critics, novelists, philosophers, men and women of God, and members of the general public have stood in front of the Cornaro chapel, either endorsing the initial response to the work, or expressing anger and dismay at what they consider to be a shameless sacrilegious depiction of Saint Teresa’s vision, or dismissing Bernini’s sculpture as a typical example of the deplorable excesses of Baroque art—a corruption of aesthetic principles, animated by hubris, and executed in bad taste. Shortly after the unveiling of Bernini’s equestrian statue The Vision of Constantine in 1670, an anonymous pamphlet started to circulate in which the author denounced both the artist’s recent work and some of his earlier sculptures. Of Saint Teresa in Ecstasy it was said that Bernini had “dragged that most pure Virgin not only into the Third Heaven, but into the...