Vision of St. Teresa of Avila

This 1727 Vision of Saint Teresa of Avila at the Kunsthistorisches Museum depicts the Spanish Carmelite mystic's celebrated ecstatic experience—the transverberation, in which an angel pierces her heart with a flaming arrow of divine love, as Teresa described in her autobiography. The subject had been definitively treated by Bernini's sculpture in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, and Ricci's painted version engages with that Baroque tradition. Painted near the end of his career, Ricci renders Teresa's spiritual transport with characteristic Venetian warmth and luminosity. The vision's combination of spiritual and erotic imagery—precisely as Teresa herself described it—attracted Baroque artists who could sublimate such intensity within orthodox devotional frameworks.

The mystical vision is rendered with Ricci's luminous palette, the saint's ecstasy conveyed through the contrast between her earthly figure and the celestial radiance of the divine vision.