Or, Jesuit Church, also know as the University Church. It's a gorgeous building tucked into an innocuous courtyard in the middle of the inner city.
"Jesuitenkirche Seipel-Platz-Wien-DSC 4625w" by P e z i - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
In blog time, we were nearing the end of June, and the end of our time in Europe. (1) My brother, his wife and their two children were spending ten days with us, and I planned a whirlwind tour of Vienna, Brno and Prague. Which I will share with you as time permits over the next week or two.
Do you know what "Quadratura" is? I did not, prior to visiting the Jesuit church, but I shall now attempt to elucidate. In the short form, Quadratura is one type of illusionistic ceiling painting (there are several types). The basic concept behind illusionistic ceiling painting is that the artist uses a flat or slightly concave surface and creates the illusion of depth with paint.
That blinding glimpse of the obvious leads us to the specific style that is Quadratura: the deception uses perspective theory, thus not creating a simple illusion that you can see from directly below, but rather one that has greater depth, and as Wiki most eloquently points out: "Due to its reliance on perspective theory, it more fully unites architecture, painting and sculpture and gives a more overwhelming impression of illusionism than earlier examples." Wiki
When you are standing in just the right place, which is no where near directly underneath this dome, you perceive a dome.
This is what it looks like when you are directly under it. Neat, right? And painted in the early 1700s by Brother Andrea Pozzo, monk artist, whose ceiling illusion paintings still astonish all over Europe.
This one is a bit tricky to photography, but the illusion is vibrant when you are in the church: the gold ball is a semi-raised sphere that looks as though it is a sculpture, while the cross, clutched in the cherub's hand is painted on the wall. When you are peering up at it, it looks as though ceiling fresco and statue are somehow one. It's pretty impressive, particularly when you realize that it was conceived and executed 300 years ago: pre-Photoshop, humans did all of their own visual stunts by hand.
These glorious marble pillars are no such thing: they are ertzatz marble, which is to say that they are constructed of a cheaper material and only have a marble veneer.
The church's opulence is a bit embarrassing for someone who imagines the Jesuits to be the learned teachers of the Catholic church. The gilding and the sumptuousness made me feel more as though I were visiting Versailles or Schönbrunn Palace rather than a place of worship, but of course the Catholic Church in the 1700s was incredibly weathly, and their wealth was displayed in the houses they built ostensibly for prayer.
Definitely not my cup of tea, and one imagines very difficult to keep the glittery nooks and crannies clean and I cannot imagine what the winter heating bill is like, but the art work was spectacular and well worth a visit.
Next: More Vienna
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(1) In Real Time, if you are curious, the children start school in a few days, the house still isn't "unpacked," and we are short a fair bit of furniture. We have ordered the bits that are missing, and Amish men in Ohio are busily sanding and varnishing as we speak, so one hopes that will be in possession of a dining room table before Thanksgiving. American Thanksgiving, that is.
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