Bernini: The Sacred Body in Baroque Marble
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) did with marble what Caravaggio did with paint: he made the sacred physical, the spiritual bodily, the transcendent tactile. Where Renaissance sculpture sought the ideal form — the perfected body in its classical equilibrium — Bernini sought the momentary: the exact instant of transformation, the precise second when one thing becomes another. His Apollo and Daphne captures the millisecond in which a woman becomes a tree, her fingers already sprouting leaves, her feet already rooting; his Rape of Proserpina shows Pluto's fingers pressing into Persephone's thigh so realistically that viewers reach out to touch the marble to confirm it is not flesh. His Ecstasy of Saint Teresa — the centerpiece of the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome — depicts the Spanish mystic at the moment of divine union described in her autobiography: the angel's arrow piercing her heart, her body collapsing in an ecstasy that is simultaneously spiritual ...