Andrea Pozzo

Walk into the church of Sant'Ignazio in Rome, find the marble disc set into the floor, and look up. The nave ceiling seems to open into the sky, with columns and figures soaring hundreds of feet above your head. It is flat plaster, painted by Andrea Pozzo in the 1690s, and it only lines up from that one spot on the floor.

Pozzo was a Jesuit lay brother as well as a painter, and he pushed the Baroque trick of quadratura, architecture faked in paint, further than anyone. The same church holds a famous cheat. The money for a real dome ran out, so Pozzo painted one on a flat canvas. Stand under it and it looks convincingly round, until you move to the side and it visibly buckles.

He wrote it all down in a two-volume treatise on perspective for painters and architects, translated across Europe and even into Chinese for the Jesuit missions. He spent his last years in Vienna, painting ceilings for the Habsburg court.