Imaging Heaven

Imaging Heaven is a visual narrative of frescoed church ceilings, photographed across Italy and Catholic Europe. Moving from the Proto-Renaissance to the Baroque, the book follows painters as they confront a fundamental problem: how to make the unseen realm of heaven perceptible amid profound shifts in cosmology, theology, and science.Guided by threads of light, gesture, and illusion, the photographs reveal how painters moved from shadowless gold grounds rooted in Byzantine techniques to radiant, sophisticated illumination; turned hieratic icons into anatomically precise, emotionally charged bodies; and dissolved architectural boundaries with a photographic study of trompe-l’oeil, quadratura, and di sotto in sù