Bernini's Monument for Sister Maria Raggi at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva

Maria Raggi (1552-1600) was a Genoese from the island of Chios who became a Dominican after the Turks killed her husband after the capture of the island in 1566.She immigrated to Rome in 1584 and led a life of service and prayer at the Dominican Convent at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva.

A number of miracles were attributed to her intercession, and she received the stigmata after a vision of Our Lord. The process of canonization began after her death, but Urban VIII rejected the petition.

Her Genoese relations bequeathed funds for an epitaph at the Minerva, and Cardinal Lorenzo Raggi saw the work to completion in 1647. The memorial had to be placed around a compound pier of the nave, the sixth pillar on the left side. Bernini had finished his skeleton Valtrini and Merenda monuments at Lorenzo in Damaso and Giacomo in Lungara where he experimented with windswept drapery, and he used that motif here in the black marble shroud. In the medallion Maria presses her hands to her bosom, a pose Bernini would use again for Blessed Ludovica Albertoni many years later at Francesco a Ripa.

Bernini provides only a small indentation on the back of one of Maria’s hands to indicate her stigmata, probably wary of the pope. The Raggi coat of arms with rampant lion is on the lower left, while a cross with one arm under the shroud is above the medallion held up by the two putti. Bernini found beautiful giallo antico marble for the inner border.

The sister, the cross and the putti are gilt bronze. Bernini designed a like wall monument for a similarly enraptured Saint Francesca Romana for her church on the Forum, it was executed was Ercole Ferrata, destroyed by the French in 1798