The Art of Looking Up

Catherine McCormack

• Publisher: Frances Lincoln
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780711248465
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

A guide to spectacular ceilings around the globe that have been graced by the brushes of great artists including Michelangelo, Marc Chagall and Cy Twombly. From the lotus flowers of the Senso-ji Temple in Japan, to the religious iconography that adorns places of worship from Vienna to Istanbul, all the way to Chihuly's glass flora suspended from the lobby of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas—this book takes you on a tour of the extraordinary artworks that demand an alternative viewpoint. Art historian Catherine McCormack guides you through the stories behind the artworks—their conception, execution, and the artists that visualized them. In many cases, these works make bold but controlled political, religious or cultural statements, revealing much about the society and times in which they were created. Divided by these social themes into four sections—Religion, Culture, Power and Politics—and pictured from various viewpoints in glorious color photography, tour the astounding ceilings of these and more remarkable locations:

• Vatican Palace, Rome, Italy
• Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, UK
• Louvre Museum, Paris, France
• Dali Theatre-Museum, Figueres, Catalonia
• Museum of the Revolution, Havana, Cuba
• Capitol Building, Washington, DC, USA

Four eight-page foldout sections showcase some of the world's most spectacular ceilings in exquisite detail. First and foremost, this is a visual feast, but also a desirable art book that challenges you to seek out fine art in more unusual places and question the statements they may be making. "Deepens our perspective of 40 of the most artistic, fascinating and iconic ceilings around the world." — Forbes

1

Religion

Regardless of race, geography or creed, all gods occupy the sky. The close of the Neolithic period (before 3000 BCE) saw the transformation of religious beliefs as they shifted from a focus on the power, fertility and spirituality of the earth to the introduction of the sky-god cults. These include the Abrahamic religions and, before those, the gods of ancient Egyptian and then ancient Greek and Roman pagan theology, who occupied Mount Olympus in the sky. In short, from the Indo-European period, we started to look up to see God. It was at this time that humanity began to design sacred spaces with versions of heaven to bridge the gap between that intangible godly place and our own mortal realms harnessed to the earth. But the depiction of gods in art has proven a perpetually divisive topic across world religions.

Christianity sees humankind as a reflection of a form of creator god that made man in his own likeness, a central creed that has motivated an avalanche of images that, themselves, have caused factional strife between different groups. Elsewhere, Islam denies picturing God or any form of life, preferring instead to meditate on the spiritual mysteries of creation through abstracted and geometric repeating patterns. Examples of both approaches can be found in the following pages, from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, which eulogizes the sky-bound father god giving life to the figures of the first woman and the first man, to the Imam Mosque in Isfahan, which almost levitates with colour, light and hypnotic repeated pattern to express a state of transcendent godliness outside of the material realm. Interestingly, these seemingly opposing ideologies come together in Antonio Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona, the unfinished Christian temple that suggests, with its columns and configurations of complex geometrical architecture and decorative design, that an abstract notion of heaven has its roots deep in the material earth.

Ceilings and domes were frequently used for the telling of religious narratives to those who could not read it in words, and so early images of Christianity provided an education in the scriptures and lives of the saints through more easily assimilated visual means. Such images tend to focus on transcendence and sublimation, but also judgment, sacrifice and punishment.

Religious ceilings also inevitably reflect the climate in which they were produced, for example the interest in classical humanism and the sculptures of ancient Greece and Rome, whose impact is felt in the Sistine Chapel, the revivalist fanfare of Byzantium and the Eastern Christian church celebrated in the nineteenth-century Church of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ in St Petersburg, and the reclaiming of historical techniques, styles and spiritual heritage in the face of the contamination of Western art history at Sensō-ji temple in Tokyo.

Neonian Baptistery, Italy

Neonian Baptistery

4th Century

Ravenna, Italy

Looking up at the glinting mosaic dome of the Neonian Baptistery in Ravenna connects the viewer with a special point in art’s early history. These tesserae of coloured stone, mineral, glass and shell take us to an era of images that predates what we now call ‘art’, a time when the early followers of the cult of Christianity asked themselves how they might picture God. How should they depict the invisible realms of spirituality and what symbols and tools would they use to create a language of religious beliefs that could speak in images rather than words?

At Ravenna, the answers to these questions resulted in a majestic display amid a sea of tessellated blue and gold. The two colours are symbolic. They reflect the splendour and beauty of an imagined majestic god in a celestial field of heaven, and represent the very earliest depictions of Christ as a type of sun deity emanating golden light, which emerged in the decoration of sacred spaces as early as the third century [CE].

The building of this baptistery was instigated by the Bishop Ursus and dates to the very closing years of the fourth century. It is an early example of the type of architecture that was created as Christianity took root as the official religion of the Roman Empire during the reign of the Emperor Constantine, who famously converted from paganism to the Christian faith. Built on an octagonal plan, the building had a unique function as the site for the initiation rite of baptism – a ritual that took place only once a year, on the eve of Easter Sunday. It was a place where early Christians went to be reborn and to commune with God, and this is the theme of the interior mosaic decorating the cupola, commissioned by Bishop Neon (451–473) several decades later.

The central medallion of the cupola is directly above the huge baptismal font at ground level and shows a gargantuan figure of John the Baptist baptizing a nude Christ, who is submerged up to the waist in transparent rippling water while God descends as the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. It is a visual depiction of the words of the New Testament gospel of Mark 1: 9–11: ‘Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens open and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.”’ Much of this image has been crudely restored during postmedieval alterations, including John’s head and arm, Christ’s head and shoulders, and the dove. The most significant change is that, originally, Christ was depicted as beardless, in keeping with fourth- and fifth-century early Christian depictions in which the figure of God-made man resembled the youthful and clean-shaven Apollo, the pagan god of sun, enlightenment and creativity. A smaller figure of an elderly man looks on and is a personification of the River Jordan. The picturing of the river as a figure is doubly significant. Firstly, this was a solution to the conundrum of how to depict the idea of ‘living water’ – a concept that was central to the sacrament of baptism. Secondly, it was...