Giovanni Battista Gaulli

In 1671 the head of the Jesuit order in Rome went looking for someone to paint the ceiling of the Gesù, their mother church, and asked his friend Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the sculptor who had shaped much of Baroque Rome, for a name. Bernini pushed hard for a young Genoese painter he had taken under his wing, Giovanni Battista Gaulli, known everywhere by his dialect nickname, Baciccio.

What Baciccio delivered, unveiled on Christmas Eve of 1679, is one of the boldest illusions in any church. Painted figures spill past the edges of the fresco onto the gilded stucco of the vault, so that saints and sinners seem to tumble down into the real space of the nave, while the golden name of Jesus blazes at the center. He had learned the trick of soft, glowing faces from Correggio, an earlier master of painted domes, and the sheer theatrical energy from Bernini himself.

Baciccio was also one of the busiest portraitists of his day, and painted seven popes over his career. He outlived Bernini by nearly a quarter century, and kept working in Rome until his death in 1709.