In the 16th century, Saint Teresa of Ávila spoke of being visited by an angel, of the sweetness of this excessive pain as he pierced her heart with a golden shaft. Theresas words, and her canonization some 40 years after her death, led the prominent 17th-century artist and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini to sculpt her as a figure bridging the seemingly disparate states of religious and almost sexual euphoria.
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