Rome Journal X: St Teresa, on Ecstasy

watercolor by Hallie Cohen

One of the great Bernini sculptures “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa" appears in S. Maria Della Vittoria on the Via XX Septembre. The sculpture depicts an angel shooting and arrow into Teresa. The sculpture itself, set in an aedicule, epitomizes the high drama of the    baroque sensibility. Maderno  sculpted another writhing saint, Cecilia, which lies in the church named after her in Trastevere. But here is what Saint Teresa herself said about the experience which Bernini attempted to render: “The pain thereof was so intense that it forced deep groans from me; just as the sweetness which this extreme pain caused me was so excessive, that there was no desiring to be free from it; now is the soul then content with anything less than God.” Here is a quote from Balzac’s The Girl With the Golden Eyes which expresses a similar sentiment about pleasure. “Pleasure is of the nature of certain medical substances; in order to obtain constantly the same effects the doses must be doubled, and death or degradation is contained in this last.” Can we say that the endorphins that had kicked in when Saint Teresa got shot by the arrow were beginning to wear off when she wrote her Life of Saint Teresa, Chapter XXIX from which the above passage emanates? Was the arrow a kind of spiritual syringe and was she a junkie who simply need another dose of God? But no matter. Here is the famed art historian Ernst Gombrich on the statue: “Even the treatment of the drapery by Bernini is entirely new. Instead of letting it fall with dignified folds after the classical manner, he lets it twist and swirl to accentuate; the dramatic and dynamic effects.”

The Unknown Masterpiece

Photo: Jeff Kubina

The Unknown Masterpiece of Balzac’s title is a painting of a great whore, Catherine Lescault, “whom men called ‘La Belle Noiseuse.” And a young painter named Nicholas Poussin, who would become one of the great masters of the 17^th century, is willing to whore his lover, Gillette in order to achieve the greatness that will come from seeing it. The painting is the work of one Frenhofer,  a wealthy student of the great Mabuse who “had sacrificed the greater part of his fortune to enable Mabuse to indulge in riotous extravagance, and in return Mabuse bequeathed to him the secret of relief, the power of giving to his figures the wonderful life, the flower of Nature, the eternal despair of art…” Esthetic versions of the Faustian bargain are everyone in Balzac’s short story along with a dizzying dialectic concerning both the whoring of souls for genius and also art’s rendezvous with reality. “My painting is no  painting,” says Frenhofer. “it is a sentiment, a passion. She was born in my studio; there she must dwell in maiden solitude…Have we Rafael’s model, Ariosto’s Angelica, Dante’s Beatrice? Nay, only their form and semblance. But this picture, locked away above in my studio, is an exception in our art. It’s not a canvas, it is a woman--a woman with whom I talk. I share her thoughts, her feelings, her laughter.” Finally, Frenhofer relents and Poussin is urged to live up to his end of the bargain. “The flower of love soon fades, but the flower of art is immortal,” he is advised. When they finally enter the studio to see the great masterpiece Frenhofer comments, ‘There is such depth in that canvas, the atmosphere is so true that you cannot distinguish it from the air that surrounds us. Where is art? Art has vanished, it is invisible.” Balzac’s story treats the search for greatness as a perversion, with art itself as a kind of paraphilia and the coup de grace is that the sacrifice, by the great and the obscure at the temple of art, is all an illusion. The Unknown Masterpiece, alas, is like the emperor’s new clothes. It doesn’t exist. 

What to Bring on the Ark

Biblical level catastrophes have been making headlines with increasing frequency. So here is a list of essentials to take with you on the Ark:

Don’t go anywhere without the DVD set of Antonioni’s trilogy, L’Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse  (the stock exchange sequence in La Notte with Alain Delon is as essential as K rations). Life as we know it could not continue without Bergman. How could we understand personality without Persona, endure the absence of god without The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Lights, comprehend marriage without Scenes from a Marriage (Paul Mazursky would never have been able to make An Unmarried Woman without it), or appreciate life in general without Fanny and Alexander, which has nothing to do with the Romanovs, and has still less to do with Franklin J. Schaffner’s Nicholas and Alexandra? Tolstoy told Chekhov that his plays were almost as bad as Shakespeare’s, but we need to make sure there is room for War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Three Sisters, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, along with Lear to deal with problems of aging, The Tempest and The Winter’sTale to reinforce the notion that nothing is over until it’s over, and yes, Cymbelline to remind us that beauty can exist without perfection. Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf is great to have in any storm, along with The Wasteland  (a poem that is starting to have practical applications in our polluted world). Make room for Dante’s La Divina Commedia, Balzac’s La Comédie humaine and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, along with two chickens, two turtles, two lambs, two snakes etc.