American Imago

American Imago
Volume 56, Number 4, Winter 1999
Johns Hopkins University Press
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A Jouissance Beyond the Phallus:

Juno, Saint Teresa, Bernini, Lacan
Tom Hayes

For since each hand hath put on nature’s power,

Fairing the foul with art’s false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned.

—Shakespeare, Sonnet 127

I
In Book III of his Metamorphoses Ovid tells the story of how Jupiter teased Juno by saying
women experience greater pleasure in lovemaking than men. 1 Juno denied this, and when
Tiresias, who had experienced sexual intercourse as both a man and a woman, said he agreed
with Jupiter, Juno blinded him. Neither Ovid nor any other ancient teller of this story explains
why Juno denied Jupiter’s assertion or why she blinded Tiresias for agreeing with him, but the
answer to those questions is not di icult to figure out. Juno did not want to acknowledge that
she experienced greater pleasure in lovemaking because to do so would require her to validate
his fantasy, to acknowledge that the picture she knew Jupiter had in his mind of her in a state
of uncontrolled self-shattering ecstasy was accurate.
 Fi een hundred years a er Ovid, Teresa of Avila spoke about her ecstasies and came close
to acknowledging the truthfulness of Jupiter’s original taunt. She believed her ecstasies were
evidence that women had a greater capacity for loving God than men did (Weber 1990, 41).
The language she used to describe these experiences is explicitly sexual. For example, in her
most famous account she tells how a beautiful angel appeared to her with his face aflame:
[End Page 331]

In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point
of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails.
When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and le me utterly consumed by
the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The
sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to
cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God. This is not a physical, but a
spiritual pain—though the body has some share in it—even a considerable share.

(Teresa 1957, 210)

Is this vividly erotic description the result of naiveté or sophistication? Is Teresa

experiencing greater pleasure than a man can or is she merely reinforcing man’s fantasy of
seeing a woman surrender to him? A century later, in his poem entitled “The Extasie” John
Donne made fun of the ambiguity inherent in the word. He wittily plays with the paradox that
we must use profane language to express sacred experience. He attacks the desexualization of
love by showing that the very experience the poem presents is, by its own contradictory logic,
impossible. A spiritual ecstasy, the poem suggests, is an absurd complication of an act that
should be enjoyed for its own sake.

In his 1972–73 seminar Jacques Lacan (again) took up “the whole quarrel about physical
love and ecstatic love, as they are called” (1998, 75). Here the phrase “as they are called”
indicates Lacan’s dissatisfaction with the binary opposition between physical and ecstatic
love, which, he says, is the reason “Christianity naturally ended up inventing a God such that
he is the one who gets o (jouit)!” (1998, 76) That is, the degradation of the physical and the
valorization of the ecstatic or the spiritual increased rather than decreased emphasis on the
orgasm. Non-Christian cultures such as those in China, Japan, and India, are no less
patriarchal than Christian cultures, but they do not disparage sexual love in order to elevate
spiritual love. As Michel Foucault pointed out, these non-Christian cultures practice an ars
erotica whereby “pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted
[End Page 332] and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and
foremost in relation to itself” (1980, 57). The truth produced in this way is secret and is
transmitted in an esoteric manner. Christian cultures on the other hand practice a scientia
sexualis whereby truth is produced through coerced confession, as in Teresa’s case, and by a
nosology such as that compiled on hysteria by Jean-Martin Charcot and his associates at the
Salpêtrière Institute in Paris, which Foucault calls “a theater of ritual crises” (1980, 55) where
the inmates played out carefully staged performances before a believing public.

Christian cultures adhere to what Lacan calls “the phallic function” (1998, 39, 71–79), which
means that in order to enter into discourse, to become a speaking subject, one must assume
either the masculine or the feminine position, that is, one must either (mistakenly) assume
that one has the phallus, the abstract symbol of power, or one must assume that one is the
phallus. Lacan believed most men “were situated . . . on the side of the phallic function.” That
is, they disparaged physical love and associated it with women and valorized spiritual love and
associated it with men. Even the cherubic pilgrim poet Angelus Silesius (1624–77), confused
“his contemplative eye with the eye with which God looks at him” and partook of a “perverse
jouissance.” But Lacan knew of two women who refused to accept the binary opposition
between physical love and spiritual love—the thirteenth-century Beguine Hadewijch d’Anvers
and Teresa of Avila. Lacan granted there was a physical aspect to the ecstasies described in
Hadewijch’s poems and in Teresa’s prose; this was evident in Bernini’s statue of Teresa. He said
“You need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she’s
coming. There is no doubt about it.” But Lacan believed there was something else there too. To
him, the key question was “What is she getting o on?” (1998, 76) He knew the answer was not
the phallus.

Luce Irigaray argued that Lacan had failed to understand that he was referring to a statue
made by a man who was a master deployer of what she called “the phallic gaze” (1985a, 47),
by which she meant the way men look at women as objects, as bodies to be possessed. 2 It did
not matter that Lacan believed [End Page 333] Bernini’s statue showed that Teresa is
experiencing something more than an orgasm. Just as Juno did not like being taunted by
Jupiter, Irigaray was not impressed by Lacan’s assertion that mystics such as Teresa said they
experienced ecstasy but knew nothing about it. She did not accept Lacan’s explanation that
the reason for this di erence is that those who assume they have the phallus have a di erent
relationship to images of power than those who assume that they are the phallus. She was not
persuaded by Lacan’s argument that because a woman knows she is not whole she does not
need to repress that knowledge and that therefore there is no limit to her pleasure, or at least
that is what man imagines.

Following Georges Bataille, who believed it was wrong to think of Teresa’s ecstasies as
“nothing but transposed sexuality and hence neurotic behaviour” (1986, 225), Lacan said that
unlike those “decent souls around Charcot and others” who tried “to reduce mysticism to
questions of cum (a aires de foutre),” he wanted to understand how Teresa’s ecstasy related to
the big Other, to the phallic function, and to castration (1998, 77). Women, Lacan pointed out,
would not answer these questions because to do so they would have to use language
stabilized by a universal masculine subject. Irigaray said that when men insisted women
 refused to speak about their extra pleasure, they were confessing the limit of their own
knowledge. By adopting the platonic idea that there is a divine or sacred first order reality
behind the material second order reality men valorized the visual, the specular, over the other
senses: “Sun, ex-tasy of the copula. Cause of all that is. Focus of a jouissance which is now
reduced to merely dazzling the eye. Luminescent receptacle. Matrix for reproducing images”
(Irigaray 1985a, 303). “From this point on,” Irigaray declared, “does not that ine able, ecstatic
pleasure take the place, for men, of a Supreme Being, whom they need narcissistically but who
ultimately eludes their knowledge?” (1985b, 97) Perhaps it did; perhaps it still does. [End Page
334]

II
In sixteenth-century Spain women’s sexuality was a dangerous force. Men in positions of
power and authority charged that Teresa’s ecstasies were “a cover for literal sexual activity”
(Weibel 1976, 82). Near the end of the nineteenth century the Jesuit Father G. Hahn,
maintained that Teresa’s “diabolical visions” were the result of her inclination to hysteria. His
essay was placed on the index of forbidden books and another Jesuit Father Louis de San,
wrote an answer to Hahn arguing that Teresa’s ecstasies were attributable to epilepsy. These
men were so threatened by Teresa’s testimony that when she was canonized in 1622, they
insisted she had been “completely inexperienced and naive in regard to sexual matters” (1976,
82). And although a recent biographer believes Teresa confessed to having a sexual
relationship with at least one man (Lincoln 1984), the statement may have been true. One gets
a strong sense from Teresa’s writing that she was capable of blocking from her consciousness
things she did not wish to know.

Moreover, while she o en expressed compliance with and humility toward men in positions
of power and authority, Teresa just as o en found herself in conflict with those men. Her
family had a history of such ambivalence. Her paternal grandfather was a Jew who had
converted to Christianity, but he still practiced his original faith until, in 1485, the Inquisition
forced him and his family to walk barefoot with other Jewish conversos through the streets of
Toledo wearing yellow sambenitos as a sign of their shame (Weber 1990, 8). By the time Teresa
was born, in 1515, the family had declined socially and economically despite the e orts of her
father, the austere Don Alonzo Sánchez de Cepeda, whom Teresa greatly admired but against
whose authority she o en rebelled. 3 When she was a teenager she was fond of stories of
courtly love. Some sources say she and her brother Rodriguez wrote several such stories, but
kept them hidden from their father. Perhaps these passionate stories induced her to ask the
servants to cover for her when she went out at night to meet her lover. When her father found
out what she was doing he sent her to live at an Augustinian convent for eighteen months. A
few years later [End Page 335] when Teresa said she wanted to become a nun he tried to force
her to marry, but Teresa ran away and joined the Carmelites. Not long a er she took her vows
she fell in love with a priest. When he died a year a er they met she returned to her father’s
house plagued by fever, fits, and hallucinations.

A er she recovered she returned to the nunnery and began a reform movement called the
discalced (barefoot) Carmelites. She returned home once more to take care of her father
before his death in 1543. Around 1558–60 she had her first ecstasies or arrobamientos, which
were excruciatingly painful and le her “quite shattered” (Teresa 1957, 137). 4 Subsequently,
she learned to embrace the pain and this enabled her to experience great bliss: “when this
pain of which I am now speaking begins, the Lord seems to transport the soul and throw it into
an ecstasy. So there is no opportunity for it to feel its pain or su ering, for the enjoyment
comes immediately” (1957, 211). 5 When Church authorities heard about these ecstasies they
ordered Teresa to write an account of them. A er they read what she had written the
authorities confiscated her manuscript and prohibited its publication.

Undaunted, Teresa continued her work with the discalced Carmelites. She became friends
with a young man named Juan de Yepes who joined her reform movement and began writing
mystical works under the name John of the Cross. He too experienced ecstasy but he said he
was unable to give it “a name whereby it may be called; for, apart from the fact that the soul
has no desire to speak of it, it can find no suitable way or manner or similitude by which it may
be able to describe such lo y understanding and such delicate spiritual feeling” (John of the
Cross 1990, 159). Teresa too continued her writing, and in 1580 her confessor ordered her to
burn her commentary on The Song of Songs. “It will perhaps seem to you,” Teresa wrote, “that
some of the things to be met with in the Song of Songs might have been put di erently. . . . O
God! how great is our wretchedness! It befalls us as it befalls those venomous animals which
change into poison everything they eat” (de Rougemont 1983, 163). [End Page 336]

Six years a er her death in 1582, a bowdlerized version of her Life was published along with
other works she had written. Seven years later the Inquisition said all of her writings should be
burned. However, Philip II, with whom she had corresponded, obtained her manuscripts and
the royal family supported her canonization (Weber 1990, 162). A er she was beatified in 1614
images of her in ecstasy began to appear, and when, thirty years a er her canonization,
Bernini unveiled his statue of Saint Teresa in Ecstasy in the elaborate baroque theater he had
designed for it in the Cornaro Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria della Victoria in Rome
(Figure 1), defenders of the phallic function were appalled.
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Figure 1.
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo. St. Theresa in Ecstacy. Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

One contemporary critic chastised Bernini for having “pulled Teresa to the ground and
made this pure virgin into a Venus, not only prostrate, but prostituted” (Lavin 1980, 121). A
century later Bernini’s statue provoked Charles de Brosses, author of a popular study of
fetishism, to sardonic laughter (Souchal 1987, 21:21). William Blake’s patron John Flaxman
said Bernini’s statue was “a baneful influence, which corrupted public taste for upwards of one
hundred years a erwards” [End Page 337] (Avery 1997, 277). In the nineteenth century John
Ruskin reinforced Flaxman’s assessment. He was outraged by the statue’s continuing
popularity and declared that it was “impossible for false taste and base feeling to sink lower”
(Wittkower 1997, 11). A short while later Jacob Burckhardt said Bernini’s statue made him
forget “all questions of style because of the scandalous degradation of the supernatural”
(Weibel 1976, 79). However, when Stendhal remarked in his Prominades dans Rome that
although he agreed with a monk who told him Bernini’s statue presented “the idea of a
profane love,” he pardoned “the Cavalier Bernini all the evil” he had done to the arts (Weibel
1976, 81), he acknowledged what those who were appalled by the statue had tried to cover up,
namely, that the statue’s sensuality increased his pleasure in looking at it. What is more,
Stendhal, a professed atheist, derived an additional pleasure from his awareness of the
contradiction Bernini’s statue exemplified: that in order to show Teresa in ecstasy Bernini had
to make her appear as though she was experiencing an orgasm. Stendhal saw that he and
Bernini accepted what Teresa and her critics prevented themselves from knowing, that the
sacred is unrepresentable, that we can only allude to it by means of the profane. In other
words, Stendhal understood that an ecstasy is an example of what Derrida has described as a
 pharmakon (1981, 95–117), a supplement, something that is necessary, the final sign of one’s
attainment of oneness with the sacred, the divine, the godhead, and at the same time it is also
unnecessary, excessive, soul-shattering.

III
Stendhal saw that Bernini’s statue complied with the fantasy Jupiter had in mind when he told
Juno that women experience greater pleasure in sex than men. Beneath her thick cowl Teresa
assumes the traditional pose of an eroticized reclining nude. 6 She gives herself up to her Lord
the way men had for centuries pictured how they would like for women to give themselves up
to them. Although no contour of her body is actually visible, she is “given-to-be-seen” (Lacan
1978, 105n2). [End Page 338] She feeds what Lacan calls “the appetite of the eye,” which is
evil because it envies those whom we think possess that which we imagine we want but for
which we have no need (Lacan 1978, 115–18). The capacious folds of thick cloth, like myriad
vaginal orifices, denote Teresa’s vulnerability, her accessibility. As she falls backward in the
throes of an orgasmic convulsion her legs open and she is li ed up and cradled by a cloud. Her
eyes, half-closed beneath heavy lids, roll back so the iris is only a faint shadow on the upper
edge of the cornea. Her nostrils flare, her mouth gapes, her le arm hangs listlessly at her side
while her right hand opens as if to welcome the next thrust of the arrow, which, Michel de
Certeau has observed, is symbolic of “the will which is communicated to [the a licted
feminine body] . . . by the message of the clerics.” Teresa’s feminine body “thus o ers itself to
its receiver . . . : here is my body written/wounded by your desire” (1992, 191).

The adolescent angel standing over her is a supplementary figure, a symbol of unbounded
homoerotic bliss borrowed from Caravaggio, and thus even more of an unobtainable object-
cause of desire than Teresa herself. As Jed Perl notes, “The smiling angel that pierces St.
Teresa with an arrow . . . is not only the most beautiful angel in baroque art, it is also the most
beautiful face in the entire city of Rome” (1999, 35). His diaphanous garment clings to his
pubescent body, revealing the curves of his lower stomach and upper thigh. In Howard
Hibbard’s vivid words, his “flame-like drapery . . . seems to lick and consume his lower parts”
(1965, 140). Bountiful curls swirl about his cherubic face. His head is cocked coquettishly over
his le shoulder. He smiles mischievously and knowingly at Teresa while, with his le hand, he
gently li s her heavy cowl. He is the bearer of the phallus as well as the purveyor of the gaze;
that is, the way he looks at Teresa models the way we look at her. His smile suggests he knows
exactly what is happening to Teresa. He respects her chastity, her fidelity to her Lord, her
husband, but, like Jupiter, he also takes pleasure in being the master of her desire.

Despite Stendhal’s exposure of the underlying contradiction Bernini’s statue embodies,

critics continued to raise moral [End Page 339] objections to it. Thirty-five years ago John
Pope-Hennessy said he found the relation between Teresa and the angel “almost
embarrassingly physical” (1963, 110). Six years later Kenneth Clark said he too found the
statue’s “sensuous beauty . . . almost shocking” (1969, 191). Perhaps we are no longer capable
of being embarrassed or shocked by Bernini’s statue of Teresa in ecstasy, but the statue still
exemplifies the paradox Shakespeare alludes to in the sonnet quoted at the beginning of this
essay: the more artfully one tries to represent the sacred, the more profane the result. The
exuberance and emotionalism of the baroque style repressed or disavowed traditional
distinctions between sacred and profane. Indeed, David Freedberg has said that Bernini’s
statue exemplifies the impossibility of making those distinctions (1989, 323).

We forget how innovative Bernini’s design for the Cornaro Chapel was. Had he wished to
follow tradition, he could have carved a modest statue of Teresa and placed it on a low altar or
pedestal where it would have been visible from several angles. Viewers could have established
a close personal connection with the saint through their proximity to the statue, just as they
did with Michelangelo’s Pietá in Saint Peter’s before the protective glass was installed in 1972,
or as they still do with Michelangelo’s Rachel in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli or Stephano
Maderno’s Saint Cecilia in the Church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. They could have sealed
this connection by kissing the icon’s marble foot, as the devout continue to do today in other
chapels. But Bernini wanted something more than that. He wanted to make viewers believe
they were actually seeing the miracle of the ecstasy take place before their own eyes. He
wanted them to identify themselves with Teresa and experience what she experienced, to feel
what she felt, to be shattered by a masochistic pleasure beyond anything they had known
before. By creating what Walter Benjamin called “the unique appearance of a distance,
however close at hand” the object may be, the artist made it possible to invest the object with
the ability to return our gaze (1980, 209; and 1969, 188). Bernini knew how to do that.

By the middle of the seventeenth century in Counter-Reformation Rome the pre-Christian

idea that images were [End Page 340] visible manifestations of the sacred was being
supplemented by the new idea that images were made by skilled artisans according to the
laws of nature, which included geometry, linear perspective, and optics. This meant that “The
new presence of the work succeeds the former presence of the sacred in the work” (Belting
1994, 459). Using the techniques and strategies he learned from his friends in the theater and
from the work of Giovanni Lanfranco (1582–1647), and Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669), (o en
called the first baroque artist), Bernini wanted to re-create in the viewer the e ect of a genuine
ecstasy. He did not believe there was anything wrong with this. To him there was no moral
issue. He knew the di erence between a spontaneous, first-hand experience and the
experience a picture or piece of sculpture elicited in the viewer, but he did not believe that the
former was necessarily better in any sense than the latter. He would have argued that his
representation of that experience was as important a contribution to the promotion of piety as
the spontaneous experience was. A er all, Bernini may have argued, if Teresa had not written
about her ecstasies how would we know she had them?
 The baroque theater of divine jouissance Bernini created for his statue of Teresa is an
extimate space, one of intimate exteriority like the caves of Altamira where the real enters the
symbolic (Lacan 1992, 139). Bernini’s baroque theater does not rely on the conventional
tromp l’oeil whereby an artist creates a work of art so skillfully that a viewer cannot distinguish
between it and reality. Bernini was not troubled by the ideological implications of the fact that
the illusion of divine presence he learned to create for the stage through his technical skill far
surpassed the sacred aura of an actual relic such as a bone of a saint, which was o en hidden
or impossible to see even if it was on display. He did not see an inevitable antipathy between
the religious or sacred value of an object and its artistic or aesthetic value. [End Page 341]

IV
Teresa got into trouble with the guardians of patriarchy because she insisted that her ecstasies
were genuine encounters with the sacred, not second-order representations or illusions. She
believed that the e ect of looking at a sacred painting could never equal that of a genuine
ecstasy. In The Interior Castle, written fi een years a er her Life, she patiently explains the
di erence between feigned and real ecstasies. “I think,” she says, “that if the soul learns no
mysteries at any time during raptures, they are no true raptures, but some natural weakness
that may occur to people of delicate constitutions, such as women” (1995, 119). No one could
bear Christ’s gaze for long. It was too intense. Therefore it was easy to distinguish those who
had experienced a real ecstasy from those who had

vivid imaginations or active minds . . . [They] are so absorbed in their own ideas as to
feel certain they see whatever their fancy imagines. If they had ever beheld a genuine
vision, they would recognize the deception unmistakably. They themselves fabricate,
piece by piece, what they fancy they see; no a er e ects are produced on the mind,
which is less moved to devotion than by the sight of a sacred picture.

(Teresa 1995, 150–51)

Bernini believed quite the opposite. He never claimed to have experienced an ecstasy. He
was not a mystic. But he was fascinated by the production and performance of mysticism. Just
as Shakespeare’s King Lear “is haunted by a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer
e icacious, that have been emptied out” (Greenblatt 1988, 119), Bernini’s statue of Teresa in
Ecstasy evokes a sense of mysticism that is no longer believable; that too has been emptied
out. Bernini’s desire to create an aura around his statue of Teresa by placing it in a baroque
theater is the result of a nostalgia for a sacredness images once had but which he feared was
now being lost. [End Page 342]
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Figure 2.
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo. Portrait of a Young Man. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund. Photograph Copyright Board of Trustees,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

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Figure 3.
Ottavio Leoni, Bernini.
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Figure 4.
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, Self-Portrait, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

James Fenton has pointed out that although Bernini was a child prodigy and became the
most successful sculptor, architect, and painter of his day, he always felt insecure (1998, 22),
and François Souchal has observed that “it should not be forgotten that Bernini “took
Antiquity as his yardstick and never ceased to be haunted by the great vision of classical
harmony” (1987, 21, 20). Evidence of this insecurity, this fear that his work did not measure up
to that of the past, this consternation that his work could not, did not, evoke the sacred, is
reflected in his early self-portraits, which contrast sharply from portraits of him done by
others. For example, in Ottavio Leoni’s 1622 etching of him he appears as a bright, handsome,
charming, and facile parvenu (Figure 2). The flirtatious glance and suppressed smile suggest
smugness and [End Page 343] superficiality. But this is not how Bernini saw himself. In his
earliest known Self-Portrait made when he was sixteen or seventeen he appears vulnerable
and charming (Figure 3). His hesitant smile and slightly embarrassed gaze suggests
apprehension rather than arrogance. If he were to speak he would say “Che vuoi?” “Who is
there?” “What do you want of me?” “Why do you think I am what I am supposed to be?” In
what appears to be a rather hastily drawn Self-Portrait made several years later his gaze is
more soulful than it is in Leoni’s engraving, but it is not penetrating (Figure 4). He is clearly
vulnerable and wary, not formidable. He seems pleased with the way he looks, but he does not
appear to be excessively [End Page 344] narcissistic, arrogant, or overbearing. Unlike Bernini’s
other self-portraits, done in oil, this drawing is private. Perhaps Bernini intended to give it to a
friend, but there is no reason to discount the likelihood that Bernini drew this self-portrait
solely for himself, in which case it could be seen as a picture of Bernini’s ego-ideal, the
internalized image of himself as he would like to have looked.

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Figure 5.
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, David, Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy. Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

Bernini’s first biographer Filippo Baldinucci says that, when giving orders, Bernini “terrified
[others] by his gaze alone” (Avery 1997, 273), but in two oil self-portraits done a few years
later he is even more apprehensive and frightened. Both of these paintings, now in Borghese,
betray a painful insecurity. He is cautious, tentative, and unsure of himself. However, Bernini’s
mockingly fierce gaze is again evident in the etching G. Pino made of him, using this painting
as his model, for the 50,000 lire banknote first issued in 1992. The hysteria and paranoia
implicit in these self-portraits is explicit in the marble bust known as Damned Soul, which,
according to contemporary sources, Bernini created by looking into a mirror and copying his
facial expression as he held his le hand over a burning candle (Wittkower 1997, 233; Avery
1997, 66). Baldinucci reports that when Bernini was carving the face of David (Figure 5),
Cardinal Ma eo Barberini, soon to be [End Page 345] Pope Urban VIII, “came o en to his
studio and held the mirror for him with his own hand” (Wittkower 1997, 239; Avery 1997, 65).
By holding the mirror between himself and Bernini the Cardinal became a surrogate father.
Commentators have suggested that the Cardinal’s willingness to help the young artist perhaps
enabled Bernini to repair his internal image of himself, his ego-ideal (Poseq 1990; Adams
1993, 97).
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Figure 6.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, David, 1501–04, Accadamia, Florence, Italy. Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 7.
Bernini, Self-Portrait, Royal Liberty, Windsor Castle.
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Figure 8.
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, Head of Medusa. Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, Italy. Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY..

If we compare Bernini’s David to Michelangelo’s (Figure 6), we see a revealing contrast. The
face of Michelangelo’s statue exhibits sublime isolation and confident repose, but the face of
Bernini’s is full of torment and anxiety. His David is apprehensive and full of self-doubt,
whereas Michelangelo’s David knows God is on his side. He has no doubt he will triumph over
Goliath. Bernini’s David has no such assurance. [End Page 346] He must exert himself to the
utmost, and even then, his grim countenance suggests, he may fail. Forty years later Bernini
still saw himself as a solitary soul searching for an elusive permanence (Figure 7). In this self-
portrait Bernini’s gaze is not aggressive and his tucked-in chin and pursed mouth again betray
cautiousness and vulnerability. The hypnotic gaze with which he looks at us in this and other
self-portraits turns them into apotropaic images like the Medusa’s Head that Bernini made
sometime in the late 1630s (Figure 8). [End Page 347]

Avery believes this bust was modeled on the face of Costanza Bonarelli, the wife of Bernini’s
studio assistant, with whom Bernini had an a air (1997, 91–92), but the uncanny facial
features of the Medusa are more like those of Bernini’s David, which were modeled on his own,
than they are of his Costanza. Bernini’s self-portraits confront the fear of the return of the
repressed knowledge of fragmentation and lack. They show that, despite his prodigious talent,
skill, and accomplishment, Bernini never felt secure in his self-identity. But, if we look at the
posthumous engraving of Bernini made by A. van Westerhout from a 1680 portrait of Bernini
by G. B. Gaulli, we again see the other Bernini, the ideal ego (Figure 9). Here he is a prosperous
master cra sman who shows no sign of self-doubt. 7

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Figure 9.
A. van Westerhout, Bernini.

However, in his self-portraits Bernini’s gaze is always querulous and indecisive. Unlike his
great predecessors— [End Page 348] Alberti, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, etc.—who
saw themselves as autonomous subjects, Bernini’s self-portraits suggest that he lacked
confidence in his ability to create works of art that evoked the aura of sacredness. Like
Rembrandt, his exact contemporary, Bernini’s self-portraits show us a man who is not at all
pleased with himself. For Bernini as for Rembrandt the self-portrait was an exercise in self-
reflection., As Mieke Bal has observed:

The self-portrait can become self-reflexive, not because it shows us the face we know
to belong to the painter, but because it stands for study—for the practice of painting
and its di iculties. . . . [T]he self-portrait gains in self-reflexivity when the reflection on
painting is not signified in the study, in the exaltation of the self but in the detail that
demonstrates the danger to the self. . . . The body at risk is the representation of the
threat to subjective wholeness that self-reflection poses.

(1991, 254–55)
 I maintain that Bernini’s Saint Teresa in Ecstasy is an attempt to counter this threat, to
forestall the aphanisis or fading of the subject that is evident in all of Bernini’s self-portraits.

V
When we enter the Cornaro Chapel we get the sense that we are in a small baroque theater,
but it is not an Aristotelian theater of divine justice where our innermost conflicts are played
out and we emerge purged of pity and fear, our sense of ourselves as members of a cohesive
community a irmed. In Bernini’s theater of divine jouissance, no words are spoken, no action
is performed, no catharsis takes place. Instead a miracle happens, and our sense of ourselves
as isolated individuals is a irmed. To achieve this e ect Bernini placed his statue of Teresa on
an oval stage behind a proscenium arch with piers and columns supporting an ornate broken
pediment [End Page 349] with a convex center and concave sides. Thus the statue seems to
burst from its surroundings. Ideally, viewers who submit to the mimetic spell identify
themselves with Teresa and undergo a self-shattering ecstatic experience like that which she
describes in the famous passage in her Life.

As part of his e ort to create the illusion that we are in a baroque theater, Bernini made
statues of eight patriarchs of the Cornaro family and placed them in mock-galleries on either
side of the transcept (Figures 10 and 11 ). Many commentators have said this was a clever
thing for Bernini to do, but no one has explained why none of these figures is submitting to the
mimesis, why they are all withholding themselves from psychic participation in the miraculous
event they are witnessing. In the le gallery one of the figures is reading a book. Possibly he is
comparing Teresa’s description of her ecstasy with Bernini’s statue. Two figures are engaged in
animated conversation. They are more interested in discussing the scene than in experiencing
it. The other figure in this gallery, the Doge Giovanni Cornaro, father of the chapel’s patron, is
seated so far back in the gallery that he could not see the statue of Teresa even if he wanted to.
But he obviously does not want to see the statue. His eyes have the blank look of someone
who is daydreaming. His gaze is directed inwardly.
 Click for larger view
View full resolution
Figure 10.
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo. View of the right side of the Cornaro Chapel. Cornaro Chapel, S. Maria della Vittoria, Rome,
Italy. Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Click for larger view

View full resolution
Figure 11.
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo. The Cornaro on the Balcony. Cornaro Chapel, S. Maria della Vittoria, Rome, Italy. Credit:
Scala/Art Resource, NY.
 Two of the figures in the right gallery are also conversing and paying no attention
whatsoever to the event they ostensibly came to see. One figure appears to be looking toward
the stage, but his impassive expression and the carefully folded handkerchief he holds in his
le hand, perhaps in readiness to wipe his face or shield his eyes, leave no question about his
desire to withhold submission to the mimetic spell. The fourth figure in this gallery is the
chapel’s patron, Cardinal Federigo Cornaro, who venerated Teresa and asked Bernini to carve
her statue with his own hands (Bernini 1976, 34). Like his father, the Cardinal is completely
self-absorbed. He stares o into space with large, deep-set eyes. (He is the only one of the
eight figures whose eyes have incised pupils and irises, thus he appears more “alive,” more
present, than the others. He is a unique inescapably divided subject). His high-domed
forehead, deeply-chiseled cheekbones, aquiline nose, and sensuous [End Page 351] mouth
make him appear both attractive and frightening, seductive and repressive.

This figure does not return our gaze, but he embodies what Lacan calls the gaze of the big
Other. This means that when we look at him we form a mental picture of ourselves looking at
Teresa. We see ourselves seeing her and we suddenly understand why none of these
patriarchal figures willingly suspends his disbelief, for if they did that, if they allowed
themselves to be caught up in the mimesis, they would identify themselves with Teresa and
experience a masochistic self-shattering jouissance beyond the phallus. They would cease to
be repressive fathers who represent the Law, the incest taboo, and would become obscene
and impotent fathers of enjoyment. Whether or not they acknowledged it when they were
alive, these men were guardians of patriarchy. They believed that because Teresa was a
woman she was contaminated. She had a shameful place between her legs, a pudendum,
which had the potential to lure men away from their commitment to the spiritual.

Have we foresaken these prejudices? When we enter the Cornaro Chapel and look at the
statue of Teresa in ecstasy do we willingly suspend our disbelief? Do we allow ourselves to
identify with Teresa and experience a masochistic self-shattering jouissance beyond the
phallus? Probably not. Why? First because as Avery has pointed out, “The whole essence of
Bernini’s achievement, a sense of mystery and divine presence, is destroyed today by
unforgiving electric lights in the chapel which over-illuminate its every part” (1997, 144–45).
Another reason we will not submit to the mimetic spell is that we have become cynical about
the possible benevolence of alternative worlds. Movies such as Steven Spielberg’s Close
Encounters of the Third Kind and its increasingly depressing epigones, Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show,
reflect a pervasive paranoia. It is not just that we believe mystical experiences—ecstasies—are
displacements of sexual drives and desires. As I have previously noted, that concept has been
widespread since the seventeenth century. What is new is that our subjectivities are no longer
formed in conjunction with a discourse of an [End Page 352] orthodox religious community
that validates the category of the sacred. Consequently, the category of the profane has also
been emptied of meaning.
 As the consummate Counter-Reformation artist, Bernini believed it was his job to create the
illusion that a sacred reality lay behind profane material reality. But by turning the Cornaro
Chapel into a baroque theater of divine jouissance, by putting the statue of Teresa on stage as
a dramatic event, a spectacle, a performance, he was doing just the opposite. He was calling
attention to the fact that a dramatic event is not reality. He was deconstructing the very binary
he thought he was preserving. Ovid’s Juno knew better. By refusing to speak of, or even to
acknowledge her plus-de-jouir, she preserved its mystery, its sacred aura. That is the source of
her supplementary jouissance. That is what she is getting o on.
Tom Hayes
Baruch College and
The Graduate Center
City University of New York

Footnotes
1. Laqueur notes that the question might “more specifically” be translated as “which sex had the better orgasm” (1990, 257n54). Laqueur
notes that “in his article on jouissance, Diderot locates the creation of desire, marriage, and the family, if not love itself, at the moment
when women first came to withhold themselves” (1990, 200).

2. Irigaray focuses on Lacan’s references to Bernini’s status in “Cosi Fan Tutti” (1985b, 86–105; especially 90–91).

In the same year Irigaray published Speculum, 1975, Laura Mulvey published her vastly influential essay on visual pleasure in which she
explains how “the male gaze” objectifies and attempts to control those who are looked at (1989, 14–26). For more discussion and
references to other contributions to the ensuing debate see Jay 1993, 530–42; and Tyler 1990, 191–212.

3. Laguardia believes that “Teresa characterizes her father as a bad ‘reader’ of her discourse” (1980, 63:524).

4. “ . . . y asi quedaba hecha pedazos” (Teresa 1921, 116).

5. “ . . . antes en comenzando esta pena de que ahora hablo, parece arrebata el Señor el alma y la pone en éxtasis, y asi no hay lugar de tener
pena, ni de padeceer, proque viene luego el gozar” (Teresa 1921, 187).

6. The earliest example I have seen of the pose Bernini chose for Teresa is an ancient Roman cameo of a hermaphrodite. Lavin suggests
Bernini had seen Correggio’s Danæ. Perhaps he had also seen Titian’s Farnese nude or his Rape of Europa, or Dürer’s famous woodcut of a
man drawing a woman, which may have borrowed the pose from Giovanni Baglione’s Divine Love tirumphant over Profane Love, or
Sebastiano Mazzoni’s Death of Cleopatra. The Barberini Faun, which Bernini helped restore, is in a similar pose (Wittkower 1997, 235–36).
Ne (1998) discusses the depiction of the Virgin Mary in this pose throughout the Middle Ages.

Guido Cagnacci’s Madonna and Child with Saints shows her with her head back, eyes partially closed, and mouth open. Before he created
his statue of Teresa, Bernini had used this facial configuration for Saint Lawrence on the Grill and for his Saint Sebastian, whose face he may
have modeled on that of Christ in Michelangelo’s Pietá (Wittkower 1997, 232). Bernini had also seen Francesco Baretta’s bas relief of Saint
Francis in ecstasy in Ramondi Chapel. He first used this configuration for a female face in Pluto and Proserpin. A er he used if for his Teresa
he used it again for this Blessed Lodovica Albertoni, which has provoked another controversy based on the specious binary opposition
between the sacred and the profane: Is Ludovica experiencing a spiritual ecstasy or is she dying? (see Sommer 1970, Blunt 1978, and
Careri 1995, ch. 2).

7. Wittkower says the terracotta high relief bust of Bernini in the Hermitage Museum [see Fenton 1998, 26] is derived from van Westerhout’s
engraving a er Galli, which was used as a frontispiece for Baldinucci’s biography (1997, 304).

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