Festival scenery with celebration of the Eucharist

In Rome it was customary to decorate church choirs on high church holidays with temporary decorations constructed of coloured papier mâch� or canvas. The most famous of these are the ones created by Pietro da Cortona for the forty-hour prayer in Rome’s San Lorenzo in Damaso during Holy Week in 1633. Drawings and engravings of these temporary “sacred sets” are the earliest evidence of the increasing tendency in the seventeenth century to transform church spaces into stages for heavenly apparitions and visions.