The Postcard
A cartolina postale that was published by Padri Carmelitani Scalzi of Roma.
The card was posted in North Finchley, London using a 10p stamp on Monday the 28th. April 1980. It was sent to an unmarried girl who lived in Birchwood Avenue, Muswell Hill, London N10.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"I thought you might
like this -- a memory of
a splendid visit with you.
Love,
Ian".
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (7th. December 1598 – 28th. November 1680) was an Italian sculptor and architect. While a major figure in the world of architecture, he was more prominently the leading sculptor of his age, credited with creating the Baroque style of sculpture.
As one scholar has commented:
"What Shakespeare is to drama,
Bernini may be to sculpture: the
first pan-European sculptor
whose name is instantaneously
identifiable with a particular
manner and vision, and whose
influence was inordinately
powerful."
In addition, Bernini was a painter (mostly small canvases in oil) and a man of the theatre: he wrote, directed and acted in plays (mostly Carnival satires), for which he designed stage sets and theatrical machinery.
He also produced designs for a wide variety of decorative art objects including lamps, tables, mirrors, and even coaches.
As an architect and city planner, he designed secular buildings, churches, chapels, and public squares, as well as massive works combining both architecture and sculpture, especially elaborate public fountains and funerary monuments.
Bernini also created a whole series of temporary structures (in stucco and wood) for funerals and festivals.
His broad technical versatility, boundless compositional inventiveness and sheer skill in manipulating marble ensured that he would be considered a worthy successor of Michelangelo, far outshining other sculptors of his generation.
His talent extended beyond the confines of sculpture to a consideration of the setting in which the work would be situated; his ability to synthesize sculpture, painting, and architecture into a coherent conceptual and visual whole has been termed by the late art historian Irving Lavin the "unity of the visual arts".
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
One of the most accomplished and celebrated works to come from Bernini's hand was the Cornaro Family Chapel in the small Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.
The Cornaro Chapel (inaugurated in 1651) showcased Bernini's ability to integrate sculpture, architecture, fresco, stucco, and lighting into "a marvellous whole," and thus create what Irving Lavin has called the "unified work of art".
The central focus of the Cornaro Chapel is the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, depicting the so-called "transverberation" of the Spanish nun and saint-mystic, Teresa of Avila.
Bernini presents the spectator with a theatrically vivid portrait, in gleaming white marble, of the swooning Teresa and the quietly smiling angel, who delicately grips the arrow piercing the saint's heart.
On either side of the chapel the artist places (in what can only strike the viewer as theatre boxes), portraits in relief of various members of the Cornaro family – the Venetian family memorialized in the chapel, including Cardinal Federico Cornaro who commissioned the chapel from Bernini.
The family members are in animated conversation among themselves, presumably about the event taking place before them. The result is a complex but subtly orchestrated architectural environment providing the spiritual context (a heavenly setting with a hidden source of light) that suggests to viewers the ultimate nature of this miraculous event.
Nonetheless, during Bernini's lifetime and in the centuries following until this very day, Bernini's Saint Teresa has been accused of crossing a line of decency by sexualizing the visual depiction of the saint's experience, to a degree that no artist, before or after Bernini, has dared to do.
In depicting her at an impossibly young chronological age, as an idealized delicate beauty, in a semi-prostrate position with her mouth open and her legs splayed-apart, her wimple coming undone, with prominently displayed bare feet, and with the seraph "undressing" her by (unnecessarily) parting her mantle to penetrate her heart with his arrow.
It has also frequently been noted that Saint Teresa's facial expression looks more like an accompaniment to an orgasm than a religious experience.
Matters of decorum aside, Bernini's Teresa was still an artistic tour de force that incorporates all of the multiple forms of visual art and technique that Bernini had at his disposal, including hidden lighting, thin gilded beams, recessive architectural space, secret lens, and over twenty diverse types of colored marble: these all combine to create the final artwork:
"A perfected, highly dramatic and
deeply satisfying seamless ensemble".
A Massacre in Sokoto
So what else happened on the day that Ian posted the card?
Well, on the 28th. April 1980, in the Sokoto State of Nigeria, police fired guns into a crowd of people. They were protesting against the inundation of their land from construction of the Bakolori Dam of the Sokoto River for an irrigation project. A
At least 25 people and perhaps as many as 380 were killed in the attack.
Sokoto's Governor, Shehu Kangiwa, had previously promised demonstrators that he would address their concerns.
Thomas Settle
The day also marked the death of the American aviator Thomas "Tex" Settle, who set the world altitude record of 61,000 feet (19,000 m) in 1933.
On the 25th. August 1927, Settle was the senior officer on board the Los Angeles when the airship, tied to a mooring mast, literally "stood on its nose".
At 13:29 a sudden cold weather front hit the Los Angeles; the resulting increase in the buoyancy of the airship, warmed by sunlight, pushed it upward. The tail freely went up while the nose remained tied to the tower.
Settle requested permission to disengage from the tower, but the captain "saw no need for it". Winds threw the tail further upward; Settle sent the men into the tail, but the Los Angeles kept rising until reaching a nearly vertical (88 degrees) nose-down position.
The airship slowly rotated back, and Settle called his men back and released aft balance, saving the Los Angeles from a tail-first impact.
The Los Angeles survived the accident and served until 1932, performing 331 flights without major accidents or fatalities.
