The ensemble includes at the sides two sets of donor portraits of members of the Cornaro family, who watch the main central group as though in boxes in a theatre.

The sculpture over the altar shows Saint Teresa of Ávila, a Spanish Carmelite nun (1515–1582), swooning in a state of religious ecstasy, while an angel holding a spear stands over her, following her own account of a vision she had.

Paul in Ecstasy', which was replaced by Bernini's dramatization of a religious experience undergone and related by the first Discalced Carmelite saint, who had been canonised not long before, in 1622.

He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God.

[5]The group is illuminated by natural light which filters through a hidden window in the dome of the surrounding aedicule, and underscored by gilded stucco rays.

The art historian Rudolf Wittkower wrote: In spite of the pictorial character of the design as a whole, Bernini differentiated between various degrees of reality, the members of the Cornaro Chapel seem to be alive like ourselves.

The supernatural event of Teresa's vision is raised to a sphere of its own, removed from that of the beholder mainly by virtue of the isolating canopy and the heavenly light.

[6]The effects are theatrical,[7] the Cornaro family seeming to observe the scene from their boxes,[8] and the chapel illustrates a moment where divinity intrudes on an earthly body.