Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was the dominant artist of seventeenth-century Rome: sculptor, architect, painter, opera producer. When the Venetian Cardinal Federico Cornaro asked him in 1647 to refurbish the family chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Bernini designed not just a sculpture but the choreography of the entire room.

At the centre is Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) and a mystical experience she recounts in her autobiography: an angel arrives with a golden arrow and pierces her heart again and again — 'the pain was so great that it made me moan, and yet so surpassing was the sweetness that I would not wish to be rid of it.' The Counter-Reformation Church promoted this mystical model approvingly; the erotic charge already belongs to Teresa's own text, not Bernini's addition. Even so, his depiction — slack foot, head thrown back, mouth half-open — provoked debate in seventeenth-century Rome.

The invention is in method. Bernini made light part of the work: a concealed window above the niche channels daylight down along gilded bronze rays mounted behind the figure, so that what literally illuminates the scene is a heavenly light. On the side walls, members of the Cornaro family lean from balcony-like reliefs to watch — placed exactly as theatre-box spectators, at the same position the viewer occupies. The whole chapel is a single stage; the visitor entering it completes the fourth wall.

The ensemble is still in place at Santa Maria della Vittoria. It stands as a private, almost concealed masterpiece in Bernini's biography — overshadowed by his vast public works at the Vatican, including the colonnade of St Peter's Square and the baldachin.