When in Rome, look up to the heavens in the nave of the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola and you’ll be in for a sweet surprise, as the lofty heights of heaven appear as real as you and I.
Yet builders didn’t construct the nave’s dome and vaulted ceiling; lay Jesuit brother Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709) created it entirely with paint and mathematical perspective. Pozzo’s painted ceiling is the best example of “quadratura,” an illusionistic and realistic rendering of architecture and sculpture on walls or ceilings.
On the ceiling, Pozzo depicted Christ and the Virgin Mary welcoming St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus (known as the Jesuits), to paradise. God sends light to Christ, who emanates rays of light throughout the painting. One ray shines straight to St. Ignatius’s heart. Christ radiates more rays of light to allegories of four continents—Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas—celebrating the Jesuit missionaries’ work there.
Several scenes show Ignatius’s life leading up to his apotheosis, a theme that the artist extended throughout the church. Pozzo depicted Old Testament figures such as Judith and Holofernes, David and Goliath, Jael and Sisera, and Samson and the Philistines to further reinforce the Roman Catholic faith in the Counter-Reformation period.
A Tradition Aiming for Righteousness
Pozzo’s painting is part of a centuries-old tradition whereby patrons across Europe commissioned artists to decorate prominent buildings with a series of decorative themes that might encourage faith, patriotism, and morality, and also glorify a country’s rulers, royalty, and great historical figures. Artists saw every building surface, including the ceiling, as a canvas to convey these commissions.
A new exhibition, “Looking Up: Studies for Ceilings, 1550–1800,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington explores the decorative tradition of ceiling painting. Around 30 of the gallery’s drawings are on display, including Andrea Pozzo’s illusionistic architecture for the vault of the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola in Rome. Together, the drawings show the development of the decorative tradition of ceiling painting: from architectural frames to illusionistic and dramatic scenes of the Baroque, to the geometric and idealized scenes in the neoclassical style.
The drawings on display also show how the artists prepared these monumental ceiling compositions much like they would any painting on canvas. First they made preliminary sketches, and then developed architectural schemes and sometimes detailed figure studies. For instance, Italian painter Livio Retti’s delicate composition study for his fresco “The Triumph of Virtue and Divine Wisdom” shows the personification of Wisdom at the peak, presiding between the Virtues. Directly below Wisdom, Virtue fights and tramples the Vices. Retti’s finished ceiling painting is in the city hall in a city named Schwäbisch Hall, which is northeast of Stuttgart, in southern Germany. The painting reminds those in the council chamber of their civic duty.
Italian painter Luigi Garzi’s black chalk study of “St. Catherine of Siena on a Cloud” shows her rapt in a vision of St. Catherine of Alexandria, where she sees the saint with the Christ child. In Garzi’s finished work, which is in the Church of St. Catherine in Formiello in Naples, Italy, St. Catherine of Siena looks adoringly up to the heavens as her vision unfolds above her, all to remind church visitors of their faith.
Exhibition visitors can also look up to the heavens of the gallery space to see a photograph of Pozzo’s heavenly nave of the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola, giving them a glimpse of the stupendous ceiling and this centuries-old tradition.
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