ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the Teresa's official persona as presented in a temporary decorative program called an apparato that was installed in the Roman church of S. Maria della Scala for the celebration of her beatification in 1614. Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada lived from 1515 to 1582, and is known as Teresa of Avila after the city of her birth in Spain, or Teresa of Jesus, the name she adopted as a religious. In addition, four aspects of Teresa's universal holy realm were especially envisioned in the apparato: the spaces of her lived experience in Spain, her dominion as the matriarch of a worldwide missionary order, the prominent place that she and her order were meant to occupy in the papal city, and her eternal residence in heaven. In the crossing, the important theme of global geography was introduced by four temporary faux-marble obelisks that were affixed to the giant pilasters on the piers supporting the dome.
