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.”

Rome Journal III: Mi Ricordo Mamma Roma

watercolor by Hallie Cohen

Da Meo Patacca is set in the heart of Trastevere only a few steps away from Santa Cecilia where Stefano Maderno claimed to create his sculpture from the remains within the tomb of the famously tortured religious figure after which the church is named. The restaurant was one of the locations for the filming of Piero Paulo Pasolini’s greatest movies, Mamma Roma (1962). In the scene in question Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani) is watching her son on his first day at work in a trendy restaurant. Magnani, a former prostitute, dreams only of living a new life and she has gotten the boy the job as part of an unrealistic and doomed plan for social rising. Ettore like Saint Cecilia is another tortured character. He's a petty thief who's tormented by the knowledge of his mother’s past. He’ll appear later on in the film, tied to a wooden platform in a prison hospital, in a scene modeled on Mantegna’s The Lamentation of Christ. On a recent January afternoon the cobbled patio of the restaurant where Pasolini once filmed is deserted. Christmas lights still hang from a tree, along with broken statuettes which line the outside of the building where the restaurant itself is housed. Inside a lit trophy case includes pictures of local soccer stars along with Anna Magnani who's shown presiding over a table at the height of her fame. Just a few steps further away is the church of S. Francisco a Ripa which contains one of Bernini’s most famed pieces the Beata Ludovica Albertoni. Despite Pasolini's infamous and transgressive reputation (the images of human degradation in Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom ,1975, based on Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom,1785, never fail to shock filmgoers), the path towards the making of a Pasolini film is lined with religious objects, a mixture of the sacred and the profane, the pagan and the Christian which is still reflected on every street corner of Rome today.