ABSTRACT
The Idea Vitæ Teresianæ is divided into five parts beginning with an introduction on mental faculties and followed by chapters on the value and practice of mortification, the acquisition of virtues, the exercise of ‘oratio mentalis’ (mental prayer) and the ‘oratio supernaturalis’ (supernatural prayer) with its promise of visions and transverberations in its highest stages. The images accompanying all five sections largely consist of nuns and monks either displaying symbolic attributes or carrying out spiritual exercises (Figs 9.3, 9.9). Antonia Sondermann suggests that the figures represent St Teresa and St John of the Cross.7 Predominantly, however, the nuns and monks symbolise mental faculties and theological concepts. For example, Karel Porteman pointed out that many images derive directly from Cesare Ripa’s ‘Iconologia’. First published in Rome in 1593, the ‘Iconologia’ quickly advanced to become the most popular guide to symbols in seventeenth-century Europe with a first Dutch edition published in 1644.8 The figures in the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ therefore have to be regarded as generic, emblematic figures. The human ‘intellect’ and ‘spirit’ is always personified by a friar, while the human ‘soul’ and ‘will’ are represented by a nun. This division is likely to be based on the fact that in Latin ‘intellectus’ and ‘spiritus’ are gendered male and ‘voluntas’ and ‘anima’ are feminine nouns.9 Owing to the centrality of the human soul as a spiritual and theological concept in prayer methodology, the nuns have a far greater visual presence in the sequence of emblems (seventy-eight images show nuns and only fourteen show friars). Nevertheless, friars also appear occasionally in scenes of mortification, mental and unitive prayer and, most
4 Alison Weber, ‘Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, no. 1 (2000), 123-46.
