Cupola decoration

religious

The picture shows the cupola, pendentives, transept vault, and antechoir of the church of Il Ges in Rome. In Baroque churches, in addition to the choir, the nave vaults, transept chapels, and cupola (if present) offered large and attractive surfaces for painting. Although fictive openings in ceilings and vaults had already been created in painting in the sixteenth century, permitting vivid views of events taking place in heaven, the heavenly visions of the seventeenth century take on a new quality, scale, and intensity.

Loading map…

About the Artist

Baciccio

1639 – 1709

Italian painter, born in Genoa (Giovanni Battista Gaulli) and active mainly in Rome, where he settled in 1657 and became a protégé of Bernini. He achieved success as a painter of altarpieces and portraits (he painted each of the seven popes from Alexander VII to Clement XI), but is remembered mainly for his decorative work and above all for his Adoration of the Name of Jesus (1674-9) on the ceiling of the nave of the Gesu. This is one of the supreme masterpieces of illusionistic decoration, ranking alongside Pozzo 's slightly later ceiling in Sant'Ignazio. The stucco figures that are so brilliantly combined with the painted decoration (from the ground it is not always possible to tell which is which) are the work of Bernini 's pupil Antonio Raggi (1624-86).

View all works →