Giovanni Antonio Fumiani

Walk into the plain brick church of San Pantalon in Venice and look up, and you are standing under what is often called the largest oil painting in the world. It is not a fresco. It is around 40 separate canvases, sewn and fitted together across the whole ceiling, showing the martyrdom and heavenly glory of Saint Pantaleon in one dizzying rush of painted architecture that seems to open the roof to the sky.

The man who did it was Giovanni Antonio Fumiani. Born in Venice in 1645, he had trained in Bologna under a specialist in quadratura, the art of painting fake buildings in convincing perspective, and he brought that Bolognese skill home. On the ceiling he used it to make columns and cornices rise far above the real ones, so a modest parish church appears to soar.

The work took him about 24 years, from around 1680 to 1704. A story later grew up that he fell to his death from the scaffolding as he finished it, which made a neat ending but was untrue. He lived another six years and died in 1710.