Baroque illusionistic painting
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- For broader context: Baroque art.
The complex and ambitious Italian tradition of illusionistic painting applied the Renaissance confidence in handling perspective to projects for ceilings and overcame the problems of applying linear perspective to the concave surfaces of domes in order to dissolve the architecture and create illusions of limitless space. (Also see quadratura and sotto in su).
Painted and patterned ceilings were a Gothic tradition in Italy as elsewhere; but the first ceiling painted to feign open space, was created by Andrea Mantegna, a master of perspective who went to Mantua as court painter to the Gonzaga. His masterpiece was a series of frescoes that culminated in 1474 in the Camera degli Sposi (bridal chamber) of the Ducal Palace. In these works, he carried the art of illusionistic perspective to new limits. He frescoed the walls with illusionistic scenes of court life, while the ceiling appeared as if it were an oculus open to the sky, with servants, a peacock, and cherubs leaning over a balustrade, seen in strongly foreshortened perspective from below—di sotto in su. This was the prototype of illusionistic ceiling painting that was to become an important element of Italian baroque.
Correggio at Parma took the illusionistic ceiling a step farther in his frescos of Christ and the Apostles for the cupola at the San Giovanni Evangelista and in the Assumption of the Virgin in the dome of the Cathedral of Parma, which is Correggio's most famous work (1520–24); in these frescos Correggio treats the entire surface as the vast and frameless vault of heaven in which the figures float. Clouds and figures protrude into the realm of architecture where the spectator stands.
[edit] Roman times
In Rome, the long-standing tradition of frescoed ceilings received a push from the grand projects in Palazzo Farnese under the guidance of Annibale Caracci and his team, but the figural subjects were still enclosed within multiple framed compartments, and the perspective of subjects seen from below was not consistently taken into consideration.
From 1625 to 1627 Giovanni Lanfranco, a native of Parma who knew Correggio's dome, painted the enormous dome of the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle with an Assumption of the Virgin that overwhelmed contemporary spectators with its exuberant illusionistic effects and became one of the first high baroque masterpieces. Lanfranco's work in Rome (1613-1630) and in Naples (1634-1646) was fundamental to the development of illusionism in Italy.
Pietro Berrettini, called Pietro da Cortona, developed the illusionistic ceiling fresco to an extraordinary degree in works such as the ceiling (1633-1639) of the gran salone of Palazzo Barberini. From 1676 to 1679 Giovanni Battista Gaulli, called Baciccio, painted an Adoration of the Name of Jesus on the ceiling of the Church of the Gesù, the Jesuit headquarters in Rome. From 1691 to 1694 Andrea Pozzo painted the Entrance of Saint Ignatius into Paradise for the ceiling of Sant'Ignazio, Rome, with theatricality and emotion.
