Santa Maria della Vittoria

Church · Sallustiano (Repubblica)Rome,Italy

A small dark Rome church holding Bernini's Saint Teresa, staged under hidden light with the family who paid watching from carved opera boxes.

Santa Maria della Vittoria is a small, dark, heavily gilded church on a busy street, and one chapel in it changed what sculpture could do. In the left transept Bernini carved Teresa of Ávila at the moment she described in her own writing: an angel with a golden spear, and a pain she called sweet. Instead of standing on a plinth, she lies on a cloud of marble that appears to hang in the air. The light on her comes from a window hidden above the pediment, and it falls down a screen of gilded bronze rays behind the figures. The part that is easy to miss is on the side walls. The Cornaro family, who paid for the chapel, are carved in marble sitting in what are unmistakably opera boxes, leaning on the rails, talking to each other and looking across at the scene. Bernini put the patrons inside the work as an audience, which leaves the visitor standing where the rest of that audience would be. The chapel was finished in 1652, and every material in it — stone, bronze, hidden window, coloured marble — works on that one scene.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Put a coin in the light box before judging the chapel — Unlit it is a dim brown recess, because the daylight from the hidden window works only with the lights on.
Come in the morning or the late afternoon — the church closes for several hours in the middle of the day, and Sunday mornings are given to Mass.
This is a working parish church — a service can start without warning, and when one starts the chapel is closed to visitors.

Things to do

1
Take the bench opposite the chapel
Sit down on the bench facing the chapel instead of standing at its rail. From there you see the whole design at once: the carved balconies on both side walls, the sculpted figures sitting in them, the altar between, and the light falling from above. It was composed for a seated viewer, and standing at the edge hides half of it.
2
Find the carved figures who are not looking at the altar
Walk along the side walls and look at the marble figures one by one. Most of the Cornaro family men are turned toward the altar, but a couple are talking to each other or reading, exactly as people do in a theatre box. Bernini carved them at different depths, so the balconies look as though they go back into the wall.
3
Walk the rest of the nave
The chapel takes everyone's attention, but the church around it is a complete small Baroque interior: coloured marble on every surface, gilded ribs across the vault, and a ceiling painted to look open to the sky. Walk down the middle and back so you see the setting the chapel sits in, then notice how dark the rest of the church is next to it.