Have you ever seen the statue called "St. Theresa in Agony"? I forget who it is by and I am too lazy to look it up, but it is a perfect example of how I feel right now. The statue shows her in complete and total ecstasy while she is being jabbed with arrows. I just got to debate Plato for well over an hour with the entire class against me. I had so much fun but at the same time their ignorance and my teacher's pigheadedness felt like arrows jabbing into my sides. I quickly got over my laziness.....it is by Bernini, here's a link to it: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/artchive/b/bernini/teresa.jpg
Must play video games to release my frustration.
Must play video games to release my frustration.
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The Fightin' Phils are headed to Cincinnati this weekend!
In the Cornaro Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome is a masterpiece of baroque theater. Inside an altar niche, on a billowy white marble cloud, is the figure of a nun who looks as if she has just fainted, or is about to. Her eyes are lidded, her mouth half open in pain - or ecstasy. Her body is limp. Nearby is a serenely smiling angel who, with one hand, gently lifts the cloth of the nun's habit and with the other aims an arrow at her heart. The marble gentlemen seated in the balconies, or prie-dieux, on either side of the altarpiece seem to be discussing this divine tableau, while, backlit by celestial golden rays, the nun and her companion are poised in silent rapture. The viewer too is transfixed: just the effect intended by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a sculptor known for wringing high emotion from stone.
The central player in Bernini's drama is Saint Teresa of Avila - Teresa de Jesus, as she named herself in religion - a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and reformer. The event depicted in Bernini's sculptural group is known in the Catholic Church as the transverberation, and it refers to a recurring vision of an angel that Teresa described in the "Libro de la vida," the book of her life. "In his hands I saw a large golden spear," she wrote,
and at its iron tip there seemed to be a point of fire. I felt as if he plunged this into my heart several times, so that it penetrated all the way to my entrails. When he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out with it, and left me totally inflamed with a great love for God. The pain was so severe, it made me moan several times. The sweetness of this intense pain is so extreme, there is no wanting it to end, and the soul is not satisfied with anything less than God.
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Wow!!! Anyway, I highly recommend this book. I'm something of a student of nunnery, having almost become one myself. Thanks for the link! BTW, you have excellent taste in movies, books and music...