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Baciccio Gaulli's Triumph Of The Name Of Jesus

Decent Essays

At the crest of the Church of the Gesù in Rome, an aureate burst attracts an equivalent infinity of attention to the infinity of light that it emits. Borne of Italian baroque painter Giovanni Battista “Baciccio” Gaulli, this aureate burst is the center of the illusionistic ceiling fresco Triumph of the Name of Jesus. It is initially unclear what is being beheld, but it demands attention nonetheless. By simultaneously depicting and inciting the spectacle of this aureate burst, Gaulli arouses a discussion of the nature of visual representation and the fundamental role of a viewer. Gaulli asserts his position as an artist and emphasizes the viewer’s duty to an image—and to an artist—by demanding the viewer to include themselves among the enamored …show more content…

An inextricable quality of ceiling frescoes is their consumption di sotto in sù (translated from Italian to “from below, upward”). That is to say, the viewer must direct their gaze skyward in order to view such frescoes. In the case of Gaulli’s Triumph of the Name of Jesus, the viewer’s gaze is drawn first to this aureate burst—a rapturous burst of light around which floats a ring of what appear to be cherubs. The burst of light casts a spire that points toward the upper bound of the fresco’s ornate cornice upon which lies a cascading banner flanked by sculpted angels and shells. Once pointed by the spire to this upper bound, the viewer may then notice the intricate floral patterns that adorn the cornice, patterns which are not repeated elsewhere in the text. Following the outline of the cornice due counterclockwise, the viewer is led to a disruption of the cornice’s outline by a set of figures on a swirling cloud whose trajectory extends beyond the elliptical …show more content…

The gazes of the fresco’s subjects run along this depth axis towards a point that lies beyond the coronal plane of the fresco. This intersection of gazes to a point beyond the plane of the visual text is reminiscent of those in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, on which critical theorist Michel Foucault comments, referring to the gazes of the model, the spectator, and the painter, “These three ‘observing’ functions come together in a point exterior to the picture: that is, an ideal point in relation to what is represented, but a perfectly real one too, since it is also the starting-point that makes the representation possible” (15). Gaulli’s Triumph of the Name of Jesus, once again, is a visual text that is viewed di sotto in sù, the viewer’s gaze turned skyward to partake of the text. This viewing takes place across a vertical space—a distance between the viewer on ground level and the vaulted ceiling—that is pronounced by a set of trompe-l'œils that the viewer is responsible for reconciling. The aforementioned disruptions of visual boundaries and patterns in the text, the disruptions of media boundaries from paint to sculpture to architecture, and the artificial shadows projected by the painted figures all contribute to the viewer’s ability to perceive this depth axis and focus on the burst of light that resides at a point beyond the coronal plane of the

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