Outside and inside: Sant' Ignazio, Rome

Entering Piazza Sant'Ignazioand losing oneself within it signifies a moment of arrival, reiterated on entry into the church, and recognition of the space from which the impulse for movement sprang. The sight of Andrea Pozzo's painted vault confirms the sense of boundless space within the immense interior. The anamorphic constructions required to create these celestial depictions raise the issue of how illusion and reality were both perceived and understood during the baroque). Such ceiling decorations were constructed to convincingly deceive the the eyes of the congregation in the nave. In the highly theatrical worship of the counter reformation the priests were beyond the proscenium arch, actors who were participants in a divinely sanctioned drama, and therefore adepts of the secret knowledge of the manifested numinous.