Bernini’s Blessed Ludovica Albertoni: Drapery and the Permeability of the Body

Abstract

Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Blessed Ludovica Albertoni has remained a footnote at the end of the artist’s long life, with scholarly treatment conveying a deep-seated discomfort with the sculpture and its possible meanings. Scholars’ inability to adequately identify the narrative moment has been compounded by a lack of direct engagement with the Ludovica’s turbulent drapery, particularly in areas which raise questions of sensuality and the body. The present examination returns to the sculptural work itself, seeking to interpret the Ludovica’s drapery with the same intensity offered to treatments of the body, and to demonstrate the centrality of permeability to Bernini’s representation of the Ludovica. Through a series of folds in the center of the sculpture which create a “cavernous opening” between the beata’s legs, Bernini engages with concerns of interior and exterior, death, dissection, wounding, and gender. Connected to the side wound of Christ and vaginal imagery, the “cavernous opening” becomes a site of Eucharistic significance through Bernini’s deeply drilled and intentionally executed drapery folds. Rather than simply providing an acknowledgement of the Eucharistic rite taking place before it, Bernini’s altarpiece can be recognized as a visual enactment of permeability, suggesting the penetration of Christ’s body and the resulting outpouring of salvation. Careful attention to the drapery enables a reinterpretation of the Ludovica in keeping with Bernini’s artistic skill and masterful execution, presenting the sculptor’s pinched folds as a crucial component of the work rather than a mere reflection of Bernini’s “style.”