ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 contrasts the ceilings of the ancient Pantheon and of the early modern Church of the Gesù. Both suggest ways of describing the divine and its relationship to the natural world. In the case of the Pantheon, we see an attempt to see the divinity of the natural world in a number of ways: as a replication of the dome of the sky with the dome of the building used as an astronomical symbol (using the sky and the sun itself as a part of the architecture and its meaning), as a meeting of the curved and the straight as a geometrical symbol and as a harmonious architecture that presents balanced natural forces of weight. This chapter discusses the political uses to which all such symbolism was put. Instead, in the Baroque decoration of the Church of the Gesù, we see the attempt to hide natural forces and to make the effects of illusionistic painting replace these forces while employing other media (sculpture and architecture) for the same purpose. This chapter compares Bernini’s attempts to do the same thing in the Cornaro chapel and in Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale. In these modern examples, nature is taken out of play, while the imagination is set free.
