Saint Teresa of Avila

1670-1700

Name(s) currently unknown

San Antonio, TX, USA, San Antonio Museum of Art (current location)

This statue portrays the Spanish nun, Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582). Her impassioned writings about her own direct encounters with God circulated widely in the Catholic world after the Counterreformation. Some of the most famous Catholic artists in Europe carved images of this saint. This image depicts her with an arm raised, as if reaching out to God.

Both Saint Teresa’s face and hands register the emotional intensity of her experience with God. This emotionality was characteristic of 17th-century European Baroque works and was carried to Spanish America by artists and through works of art. The book she holds in her hands may represent one of Teresa’s own writings, immensely influential throughout the Catholic world. The work is 46 inches tall, somewhat smaller than life. Since it has no decoration on the back, it was likely made for a retable, or retablo. The heavy drapery that encases the figure is characteristic of Guatemalan statuary of this period.

Today, it is not known who made this statue, as sculptors rarely signed their work. However, the image is likely to have come from Guatemala, where a community of immigrant Spanish sculptors settled in the 16th century and made work that was prized throughout Viceregal New Spain.

The statue was carved of wood and then elaborately finished with layers of gesso, polychrome paint and gilding. Working in a technique well-known in Spanish America, called estofado, artisans painted over the guilding on Saint Teresa’s cloak, and then carefully scratched through to reveal the gold beneath. The inset glass eyes of the figure, which glisten in the light, lend the image a sense of life.

Since Saint Teresa was the founder of the Discalced Carmelites, her statue may once have stood within a retable (retablo) in a Carmelite convent. In this context, Saint Teresa’s primary viewers would have been women, and her image would have kept company with other carvings and paintings of saints and holy figures. Today the image is housed, without her companions, in the Museum of Fine Arts in San Antonio, Texas.

As a religious reformer and founder of the Discalced (or “barefoot”) Carmelites, Saint Teresa served as a genetrix figure for women professing religious vocations. St. Teresa vividly recounted her otherworldly experiences in her Letters and Poems, which were promoted by the Counter Reformation Church. Statues like this made her inner experience visible, at least in part. Statues of Teresa and other female saints made visible, and celebrated, a female experience of religious devotion. Teresa of Avila was both intensely public (thorough her writing) but also removed from the world in a cloister. This model of female spirituality proved a powerful one for thousands of women in Spanish America who followed her footsteps into the convent.

Reproduced courtesy of the San Antonio Museum of Art; Purchased with funds provided by SAMA's Membership Tour to Guatemala; 74.60.

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Bilinkoff, Jodi. 1989. The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-century City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Steggink, Otger, ed. 1986. Libro de la vida: Santa Teresa de Jesús. Madrid: Castalia, 1986.