Church as theater

Rome's church of Santa Maria della Vittoria contains a bodacious Bernini set-piece marrying architecture and sculpture

The interior of this small church is one of Rome's most successful examples of unified baroque decoration, nicely restored in the early 1990s. The star of the show is in the last chapel on the left, where

Bernini

used full sculpture and optically tricky reliefs to turn the shallow chapel into a tiny opera house for his rendition of

St. Theresa in Ecstasy.

Under a huge burst of gilded light rays, an angel bearing the arrow of religious enlightenment alights on a sea of clouds, cocking his head and looking down bemusedly at St. Theresa. The saint in question is reclining in her voluminous robes, captured in the midst of a moment of religious ecstasy—though it looks as if Bernini used a rather more corporeal experience of ecstasy as his model.

On either side of the chapel are “box seats" so that the members of the Cornaro family—who paid for the chapel—could look on as bas relief portraits (on the left side, the half-hidden figure on the right end is said to be a self-portrait by Bernini).

Via XX Settembre 17