Apotheosis
A great wind of apotheosis shakes it[scil.: "the whole of nature"], and carries everything away, theatrically. Add to this a kind of modernism that - impatient - doesn't wait for their reputation and the slow action of secular devotion to consecrate them before bestowing supreme glorification on the saints. The Jesuit Flos Sanctorum - and Baroque iconography - quickly filled up with recent saints, a sign of complete reconciliation with nature; these saints, those who found them depicted by artists, could have seen and known them; could have witnessed their bodily life: this memory did not detract from the passionate apotheosis. Apotheosis of St. Ignatius, St. Alphonse-Marie de Liguori, St. Francis Xavier. In short, the sensibility of the Counter-Reformation carries with it a kind of belief in thenaturalness of the supernatural [...].
No opening would be more apt than this one, with Eugenio d'Ors as our guide, to lead us to the "Essence of the Baroque" [1], to suggest to us the nature of the "Baroque epiphanies", that feverish, dynamic nature that tends to motivate the present, the apologetic and ostensible necessity of belief in theHoggidì (the "day of today"). Against any univocal, reductive reading of the legacies of the Counter-Reformation, we must also evoke this need for passion, for martyred and triumphant bodies, the "sacred anatomy" of viscera still throbbing and already holy:
Di Teresa qui giace
De Thérèse ici gît
il core palpitante,
the palpitating heart,
morto ancora vivace,
dead still alive,
e senza vita amante. [2]
and without loving life.