Vesper No. 7 | Sky | Fall-Winter 2022
Giuseppe
D’Acunto
Heaven on Earth: Artifice,
Deception, and Perspective in Giovan Battista Gaulli’s Trionfo del Nome
di Gesù
Keywords
Baroque, spectacle, divine
entity, celestial, paradise, perspective
The essay propose a
reflection on the perspective and pictorial technique adopted by Giovan
Battista Gaulli in the Trionfo del
nome di Gesù painted
by the Genoese painter in Rome in 1672 and currently visible in the nave of the
church of Gesù, Baroque artifice capable of involving the observer in a
spectacle orchestrated in a continuous encroachment of the painted subjects
within the inhabited space, and capable of generating an unprecedented dynamic
of dialogue and overlapping between the plastic surfaces of the architectural
artefact, the tangible volumetry of the statuary and the two-dimensional
compromise of the painting. In this painting, the theme of the encounter with
the divine, of the infinite being transformed in perspective into a secular
object, of the physical or spiritual assumption towards the high/other, finds
an iconographic solution in the representation of the light emitted by the
divine entity. The straight lines, the physical representation of light,
‘break through’ the plane of the canvas and give that perspective
depth necessary to emphasise the vertical axis that connects the mundane to the
divine and that emulates the upward motion upwards, towards celestial glory,
towards heaven in its meaning of paradise.
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