Baroque

                                                                Illusionistic ceiling painting

                                                                    By: Melvin Conn-Baird

 

I enjoy looking at the painting on the ceilings. They so real as if people are actually on the ceiling. The man who started the illusionistic ceiling was Antonio Allegri da Correggio, usually known simply as Correggio, (August 1489 – March 5, 1534) was the foremost painter of the Parma school of the Italian Renaissance, who was responsible for some of the most vigorous and sensuous works of the 16th century. In his use of dynamic composition, illusionistic perspective and dramatic foreshortening, Correggio prefigured the Rococo art of the 18th century.  He had a great eye for capturing some beautiful place as if they were in the sky.                 

The Illusionistic ceiling painting  is the tradition in Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo art in which trompe l’oeil, perspective tools such as foreshortening, and other spatial effects are used to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on an otherwise two-dimensional or mostly flat ceiling surface above the viewer.  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.

 

Quadratura, a term which was introduced in the seventeenth century and is also normally used in English, became popular with Baroque artists. Although it can also refer to the “opening up” of walls through architectural illusion, the term is most-commonly associated with Italian ceiling painting.  Due to its reliance on perspective theory, it more fully unites architecture, painting and sculpture and gives a more overwhelming impression of illusionism than earlier examples.

Mr. Correggio would paint a feigned architecture in perspective on a flat or barrel-vaulted ceiling in such a way that it seems to continue the existing architecture. The perspective of this illusion is centered towards one focal point. The steep foreshortening of the figures, the painted walls and pillars, creates an illusion of deep recession, heavenly sphere or even an open sky. Paintings on ceilings could, for example, simulate statues in niches or openings revealing the sky.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sotto_in_su

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