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Gianlorenzo Bernini's "Blessed Lodovica Albertoni" and Baroque Devotion (Sculpture, Chapel; Italy).

Not long after the sixteenth-century Roman matron Lodovica Albertoni was beatified (1671) by Pope Clement X Altieri, Cardinal Albertoni/Altieri commissioned Bernini to memorialize the beata and dignify her place of burial in the family chapel in San Francesco in Trastevere. There he created a sculpture of Lodovica and placed it within a setting that dramatized the theological significance of her pious life and sublime death. Tracing the history of the cult of Lodovica, the Altieri chapel, and the statue, the present study illuminates Bernini's contribution, both artistically and iconographically, to the chapel, and proposes a reinterpretation of the precise nature of the experience the beata is undergoing in the sculpture. This marble statue, installed by 1674 in a lighted recess above the altar, depicts Lodovica in an attitude suggesting both ecstasy and death. The interpretation offered here proceeds from an examination of the statue in the full context of the other works of art in the chapel, of medieval and Renaissance tomb sculpture, of contemporary accounts of Lodovica's life and cult, and of devotional Catholic literature undoubtedly known to Bernini. Among the written sources consulted are the proceedings of her beatification, a panegyric composed in her honor, and a history of the church written by a monk at San Francesco. Woven into a complex iconographic scheme whose layers of meaning are mutually interdependent, the statue and the other elements in the chapel convey a unified conception. The Lodovica in its setting represents the culmination of an ideal religious life, the rewards for which are the mystical union in death and eternal glory. The sculpture, through the vehicles of lighting, space, posture, facial expression, and gesture, suggests the progress of the beata's mystical life to its very consummation when Lodovica dies in Christ, departing this world in an exquisite transport of divine love, her soul ascending to paradise. Viewed in relation to the Mass celebrated before the altar, the statue serves as an image of salvation to the worshipper and to the aged Bernini, who seems to have located his own fears and hopes within this work of art.Ph.D.Fine artsEuropean historyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/160403/1/8502911.pd