Santa Teresa on Silk in an Embroidered Frame, ca. 1800
This exquisite miniature of the famed nun and mystic Teresa of Avila (1515–82), combines no fewer than four distinct artisanal skills in one charming devotional object. The minute engraved portrait of the saint is printed on a piece of silk, which has been laid down on yet another piece of silk. This forms the background for a further delicately embroidered frame of gilt and silver wire, all of which is encased in a silver-plate frame. Likely intended both as an intimate, hand-held devotional artifact and as an eminently portable vade mecum for its owner, this handsome spiritual token embodies a hybridity of print and allied decorative arts that were often combined in so-called klosterarbeit (cloister art)—decorative and spiritual objects produced by nuns and convents for sale to pilgrims and visitors to convent churches and their relics.
The handsome embroidered frame depicts the saint within a large six-petaled flower with swirling tendrils above and below, and beaded swags are linked to four smaller flowers in each of the four corners, the upper two fixed with small pearl-like bosses. Similar embroidered flower-motif frameworks surrounding bespoke images of saints appear elsewhere in the Women of the Book Collection, including a larger hand painting on vellum of Gregory the Great.
Careful inspection reveals that the silk impression of Teresa was actually printed separately and either repurposed or, more likely, specifically printed on silk rather than paper in order to add a sense of luxury, texture, and three-dimensionality, as if to suggest the saint’s physical, even tactile, presence within the artifact. The back of the punched silver-plate frame with silver-plate scrollwork depicts the Sacred Heart surmounted by a cross and with a crown of thorns and laurels below it with the impressed signature “R. Maldonado.” It has been speculated whether this might denote a relative of the printer-publisher of Valladolid and Madrid, Vicente Maldonado, or perhaps of the Madrid-based playing-card manufacturer Pedro Maldonado.
From a young age, Teresa was passionately committed to dedicating herself to God well before she entered the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation at age twenty. Following her investiture, she denied herself all of life’s worldly indulgences, undertaking to mortify her flesh, which often left her physically ill if spiritually fulfilled. Her elaborate system of mystical theology, exposited in several of her published books, often brought her into states of ecstasy. Her reputation as the determined and indefatigable foundress of the storied Tridentine order of the Discalced Carmelites, her far-flung apostolic mission to found both male and female religious houses adhering to the order’s strict rule, and her many learned publications combined to distinguish her as one of the most admired and universally recognized women of the sixteenth century.
This last quality of intellectual rigor seems to be especially emphasized in this silk engraving, which depicts the saint in a biretta, her right hand gently clenching the angelic arrow that has just pierced her breast as the dove of the Holy Spirit flutters above—the most iconic moment in Teresa’s life, so memorably rendered in marble by the Baroque artist Gianlorenzo Bernini in his sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa for the Cornaro Chapel in the church of S. Maria della Vittoria, in Rome.
From a young age, Teresa was passionately committed to dedicating herself to God well before she entered the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation at age twenty. Following her investiture, she denied herself all of life’s worldly indulgences, undertaking to mortify her flesh, which often left her physically ill if spiritually fulfilled. Her elaborate system of mystical theology, exposited in several of her published books, often brought her into states of ecstasy. Her reputation as the determined and indefatigable foundress of the storied Tridentine order of the Discalced Carmelites, her far-flung apostolic mission to found both male and female religious houses adhering to the order’s strict rule, and her many learned publications combined to distinguish her as one of the most admired and universally recognized women of the sixteenth century.
This last quality of intellectual rigor seems to be especially emphasized in this silk engraving, which depicts the saint in a biretta, her right hand gently clenching the angelic arrow that has just pierced her breast as the dove of the Holy Spirit flutters above—the most iconic moment in Teresa’s life, so memorably rendered in marble by the Baroque artist Gianlorenzo Bernini in his sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa for the Cornaro Chapel in the church of S. Maria della Vittoria, in Rome.
In the early modern period, the biretta traditionally symbolized both academic and ecclesiastical distinction. It would seem, in its association here with Teresa, also to have anticipated her proclamation, in 1970 along with the medieval Dominican Saint Catherine of Siena, as the first female “Doctors of the Church.” Pope Paul VI granted Teresa the further singular distinction, among that most honored of Roman Catholic roll calls of honor, of being named Doctor Orationis (Doctor of Prayer).
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Gianenrico Bernasconi, “Pour une histoire technique de l’artisanat conventuel,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 63:183 (July–September 2018), 143–66; Carlos Eire, The Life of St. Teresa of Avila (Princeton University Press, 2019); Silvia Evangelisti, Nuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700 (Oxford University Press, 2007), esp.161–69; Margit Thøfner, “How to Look Like a (Female) Saint: The Early Iconography of St. Teresa of Avila,” in Cordula van Wyhe (ed.), Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2008), 59–78; Alison Weber, “‘When Heaven Hovered Close to Earth’: Images and Miracles in Early Modern Spain,” in Scott K. Taylor and Emily Michelson (eds.), A Linking of Heaven and Earth (Routledge, 2012).
