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Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the religious dimension of ecstasy finds three privileged fields of expression: the testimony of the mystic, the diffident theoretical essays of Christian theologians who attempt to classify, clarify and rationalize the vocabulary and categories of ecstasy, and images trying to represent an experience which may sometimes be spectacular but which is more often secretive and discreet because interior. These various expressions of ecstasy do not only testify to, theorize and represent an experienced ecstasy. Through their narrative, stylistic and poetic patterns, they may aim at arousing, in the reader or the spectator, a similar experience to the one they evidence. The paper focuses on Charles Le Brun’s The Descent of the Holy Spirit about which a testimony, quoted by the biographer of the artist, evokes the supernatural effect it provoked in Jean-Jacques Olier, founder of Saint Sulpice Seminary. If it is assumed that the mystic ecstasy results from a supernatural cause, we tend to believe that it is fostered as ‘ecstasy effect’ by the formal construction of the work.