Il Gesù Ceiling and Dome Frescoes
Gaulli, Giovanni Battista
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Date
1672-1683Description
Nave fresco: Triumph of the Name of Jesus (Detail of angels surrounding lower edges of fresco, north transept); On 21 August 1672 Gian Paolo Oliva, the Father-General of the Jesuit Order, signed a contract with Gaulli commissioning him to fresco the dome, the pendentives and the nave and transept vaults of the church of Il Gesù, Rome. This enormously important commission was won in competition with Giacinto Brandi, Ciro Ferri and Carlo Maratti, and with the support of Bernini, to whom Oliva turned for advice. The nine large frescoes (1672-1683) constitute the greatest achievement of the artist's career and his chief claim to fame. The cloud-borne Vision of Heaven (1672-1675) in the huge dome is badly damaged, but the frescoes on the pendentives (1675-1676) have survived in almost perfect condition. Two of these four, the Four Evangelists and the Four Doctors of the Latin Church, represent the New Law; the other two, the Leaders of Israel and the Prophets of Israel, the Old. Just as the pendentives form the physical transition that carries the weight and thrust of the dome to the ground below, so the paintings on the pendentives form the metaphysical transition between the vision of heaven in the dome and the congregation on the floor of the church. The style so successfully developed for the pendentives was transferred to the vault of the great nave and reinterpreted, with still more dramatic compositional devices and on a very much larger scale, in the fresco representing the Triumph of the Name of Jesus (1678-1679). Source: Grove Art Online; http://www.groveart.com/ (accessed 12/9/2007)
Type of Work
fresco (painting)Subject
cycles or series, New Testament, Old Testament and Apocrypha, Jesuits, Jesus Christ, Baroque
Rights
Rights Statement
Licensed for educational and research use by the MIT community only