An Italian Sculptor's Love Affair with Death; The Sensual Funerary Monuments of Gian Lorenzo Bernini
"The Blessed Ludovica" and "The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa" both depict women at the moment of their deaths consumed by an ecstatic rapture.
In 1671, Roman matriarch, Ludovica Albertoni was confirmed by Pope Clement X Altieri to have been admitted to heaven (beatified). At the time, Gian Lorenzo Bernini was old and frail after many decades working in the dusty and intense sculpture workshops of Rome. Given his age and his health, he excitedly and anxiously got to work on his commission to sculpt her tomb. In his old age, Bernini, a life-long dedicated Catholic, had become obsessed with the idea of a sublime death, the agony of which is transcended by a mystical communion with God.
This was a theme he had explored before in his work in The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa which depicts a similarly enraptured Saint Teresa the moment an arrow pierces her heart. Because of her piousness in life, a merciful God replaced the pain of her mortal wounds with intimate pleasure. Widely controversial in it’s abundant eroticism, Bernini received much backlash for the sculpture, which has been excoriated as "the grossest and most offensive example of Baroque art." Some art critics would even go as far as to demand the sculpture’s destruction.
In Saint Teresa’s autobiography, (then Teresa of Avila) she describes the scene in a religious vision she had of a divine apparition visiting her from above:
I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual, though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.
Despite the conservative and critical backlash to the monument (both within and outside of the church) Bernini and his later historians would circumnavigate the criticism by pointing out that the Catholic church has long conceded that mystical communion with God often resulted in erotic experiences.
But girls don’t get to have all the fun, there’s enough sublime death for all genders in Bernini’s eyes; his early-career sculpture, The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence is a perfect example of this equal opportunity mystical union.
The subject of the sculpture is Lawrence of Rome, who was condemned to death by Roman Emperor Valerian in the year 258 C.E. for defending the Christian faith.
Lawrence was burnt to death by being placed on a gridiron, the very gridiron and flames depicted by Bernini in his sculpture. A gruesome and painful death, once again subverted by a merciful God, to whom which Saint Lawrence gazes upon in admiration. A theme which would become Bernini’s signature: solitary subjects in extreme circumstances experiencing intense emotional states. Sounds like my Friday nights.
As much as I love these other sculptures, there was something that spoke to me deeply about The Blessed Ludovica. Who was she? What was her story? Where can I find bedsheets that beautiful? So I did what any person with a niche hyper-fixation would do and purchased someone’s 1980’s doctoral thesis from a deaccessioned library archive on the tomb.
In 1984 a scholar named Shelley Karen Perlove published “Bernini and the Idealization of Death” a comparative exploration of Bernini’s sculpture and the life of the beata, Ludovica Albertoni. She writes a vivid and beautiful description of the work:
Infused with light, the white marble sculpture of Ludovica is the climactic element in the chapel. The statue depicts the beata in a semi-recumbent pose, her head thrown back on a lace-bordered pillow, her eyes rolled back, and her mouth open. Lying in bed with her knees bent and slightly apart, the agitated garments flowing over her body as if animated by an unseen force, Ludovica grasps her bosom and waist. The quietly enraptured figure seems to belong to another world. Her private, intimate communion is undisturbed by the intrusion of the observer, who feels compelled to tiptoe before her.
Whew! I wish all doctoral theses were written like that. But as it turns out, Perlove, Bernini, and I weren’t the only ones obsessed with Ludovica; in the time of her life (1473-1533) she commanded her own cult of personality, known as “The Cult of Ludovica”.
A devout Roman noblewoman, Ludovica wished to remain a virgin and enter a convent from a young age. She did, however, honor the wishes of her parents and was betrothed to marry Giacomo Della Cetera, a wealthy nobleman. Tragically, the marriage was short-lived as Cetera died when Ludovica was only 33. After her husband’s death, she donned the traditional black sackcloth and white veil customary of clergy belonging the order of Franciscans, and dedicated the remainder of her life to acts of penance. She adopted the a-sexual aesthetic and lifestyle she longed to have as a young woman before being coerced into marriage.
She would become known as the “mother of the poor” in the Franciscan tertiary as she cared for the injured, sick, and indigent people in her community, where she often concealed pieces of gold and silver from her family’s wealth into baked bread that she would distribute to hungry children.
Perlove again:
The accounts relate that she was most assiduous in her devotions, often submitting to repeated acts of penitence [self-sacrifice] and mortification [self-denial]. At times during her prayers, she would miraculously levitate, her face inflamed by a religious rapture. At the age of sixty Ludovica was stricken with a fever, the pain and suffering of which she bore with great courage and patience. Caring little for her physical needs, she longed only for the moment when her soul would be released from her body and united with her spouse, Jesus. She took communion more often, finding comfort in the “sacrosanct body of Christ”.
Predicting with keen accuracy the day of her death, Ludovica anxiously called the confessor, her lawyer, and a few witnesses to her bedside, where she had sat kneeling and praying all day. After receiving the viaticum (the blood [wine] and body [bread] of Christ), she sent everyone out of the room and shut her door to be alone.
What exactly happened in her room after this point is lost to time, but when one of her servants was brave enough to finally re-enter the room, Ludovica seemed entranced and “flushed with joy” as if she had “returned from paradise” as the servant described. Shortly after this burst of ecstasy and while clutching a crucifix, the Blessed Ludovica joined her beloved creator.
This is the moment depicted by Bernini in his funerary sculpture; a dying Ludovica entranced by heavenly bliss as she breathes her last.
There is a concept in the end-of-life field called “The Good Death” often times referred to in history as “Ars Moriendi” or “The Art of Dying”, which came into public consciousness in Europe in the aftermath of The Black Death, where so many people died such a bad death.
The good death is the ideal death: we all have to die, so how do you want to go? For medieval Europeans, and later Victorians, there were very specific and narrow views on what constituted a good death. The Victorians were the folks who brought us the lovely “death-bed scene” in popular media, where an ailing person is surrounded by their loving family saying their last good-byes– an intrinsic cliché in our pop culture.
There has been a recent resurgence of the term, “good death” with the death-acceptance movement, popularized by internet personalities, authors, and thinkers– like Ask A Mortician’s Caitlin Doughty. But luckily these movements share more expansive and progressive ideas on what a good death can look like and how to strive for it this day and age.
Through his sculptures, Bernini was showing us his own views on what a good death looks like, but by projecting it onto women’s bodies as vessels of divine fascination, endlessly perceived through a voyeur’s purity lens of permissible sexuality. I often wonder about how a good death can extend through how you are remembered after you die. Maybe an apt term would be “a good legacy"?
I wonder how these deeply religious women would feel about their most intimate moments being frozen in stone and put on display above their bodies for all to see. Maybe they’d be proud, maybe they’d be horrified, maybe they’d feel embarrassed.
All I’m saying, is that there’s a reason Ludovica sent everyone out of the room.
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