Nave vault

The picture shows the nave vault with Mary scenes in three centre canvas paintings: the Presentation of Mary in the Temple. Annunciation to the Virgin, Assumption of the Virgin.

A narrative scene painted on a wall as a framed picture was referred to as a “quadro riportato,” which to seventeenth-century thinking suggested that a framed panel painting had been translated into the medium of fresco. If a picture with the perspective of a panel painting is shifted to the ceiling, it is called a “quadro finto” (fictitious picture). In such a case the painted architectural framing is replaced by a painted or three-dimensional picture frame.

Another solution for ceiling decoration was realized by Veronese in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. He simply inserted his complex program of pictures structured in different sizes and shapes into the massive coffering system as true canvases. There are also mixed forms, in which pictures painted on canvas were inserted into a ceiling fresco as quadri riportati. Antonio Gherardi created an original example of this type in the vault of Santa Maria Trivio in Rome. In a direct borrowing from Veronese, he presented scenes from the life of the Virgin from an extremely low vantage point in three oil paintings separated only by narrow strips of framing. The iconography of the central Assumption of the Virgin is almost unrecognizable because of the foreshortening, and even the other scenes executed in fresco in the caps of the vault and the spandrels are greatly deformed by the steep angle at which they are viewed from below. With his interpretation of church vaulting, Gherardi, though valued as an architect and worker in stucco, was unable to make his way as a painter in Rome.