ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the work of Giovanni Niccolo Servandoni, the master of theatrical illusion during the eighteenth century. Servandoni painted various ceilings during his career as an architect, but the only one that remains is a trompe l’oeil of a coffered ceiling that he painted in 1724 at the Château de Condé in France. The painted ceiling completes the illusionistic decorations of a reception hall dedicated to theater and music. Those decorations were painted on canvas extended on a wooden frame in a manner very similar to stage sets. At that time, Servandoni had made a name for himself as scene painter at the King’s Theatre in London. The novelty of Servandoni’s stage design involved in part the disappearance of the virtual ceiling of the depicted scene, a method by which a stage set could be made to appear much larger than the actual panels on which it was painted by using gigantic architectural elements in the foreground where the complete image could be imagined to extend upwards into the fly tower. The invisible ceiling of the stage area was a precondition to the illusionistic effect.
