Imaging Heaven

Vividly presented here in all of their diversity and splendor, these illusionistic ceilings, mainly located in the churches and palaces of sixteenth to early eighteenth-century Italy but also found in Austria, Germany, and Spain, are revealed as dazzling examples of Italian artistic imagination by some of the major figures of the period, including Mantegna, Melozzo da Forlì, Michelangelo, Correggio, Tintoretto, the Carracci, Caravaggio, Guercino, Guido Reni, Giovanni Battista Gaulli, Andrea Pozzo, Sebastiano Ricci, and the Tiepolo dynasty.

These images, many of which represent turning-points in the history of art, are accompanied by an in-depth introductory essay placing them in context by the art and architectural historian Daniel Sherer, who teaches at the Princeton University School of Architecture, concise descriptions by Brian Kish, a well-known expert on Italian art and design, and a postface by Martin Kemp, the renowned scholar of Renaissance and Baroque art and science of Oxford University.

Bringing together in one place these remarkable frescoes for the first time, this book will be indispensable for art historians, connoisseurs of photography, and all those interested in Renaissance and Baroque art Imaging Heaven explores a photographer's journey through Italy and Europe, capturing illusionistic ceiling frescoes painted between the 14th and 18th centuries that blend illusion and reality.

Imaging Heaven records a contemporary photographer's journey in this captivating exploration of illusionistic ceiling frescoes that emerged in palaces and churches across Italy and expanded into Catholic Europe. The sites presented in the book date from the 14th to the 18th century, tracing the evolution of a stylistic mode defined by its embodiment of the diametrical opposition between illusion and reality in representations of heaven.