> If I must analyze it further, I get the impression that Bernini is being
> very cynical: Theresa's mystical experience is just theatre; the church is
> just theatre. So in the end, the mystical vanishes and all that remains for
> me is erotic. Sorry, but this fish won't nibble on that bait.
>
> mark
If anyone is being cynical here, Mark, perhaps it is not Bernini?
The metaphor of theatricality is a later construct, framed to help
outsiders (a later culture) understand this period. Although I do
sometimes wonder about opera when I consider the box seats at the
side of the Cornaro chapel, I also wonder about box pews. This was
a private chapel, after all, which had more complex social
motivations than simply displaying a tableau of mysticism. The
Cornaro family paid for the decoration of their chapel, and neither
the materials nor the artist came cheap, I'll wager. It was
intended to provide a very public image of their piety. The primary
intended audience were their social peers -- and, undoubtedly, their
betters. If reactions comparable to yours had been at all common at
the time, there is a very good possibility that they would have been
recorded -- as, for example, were criticisms of Michelangelo's
earlier Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel (including that it was
more fitting for a bordello than a church, by the way!). My
understanding of Baroque Rome is not very great, but the Baroque
papal court might, indeed, be judged a rather worldly place, in
which largely secular values concerning the quality of art at least
vied with more purely religious motivations, but as has been pointed
out, in the pre-Victorian era, attitudes towards human sexuality
were not in nearly so repressed a state as they are now -- or even,
perhaps, as they had already become in the newly Protestant areas of
Europe. One of the most useful ways that I have been able to make
use of a "Post-Modern" perspective in teaching medieval art history
is in pointing out the great differences in current attitudes towards
religious art among those with Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox,
Jewish, etc. backgrounds.
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag
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