Jesuit Church (University church)
Baroque university church with a flat ceiling painted to trick the eye into seeing a soaring dome.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Jesuit university church in Vienna follows Andrea Pozzo, a Jesuit lay brother who had already fooled all of Rome with a painted illusion, brought north in 1703 by Emperor Leopold the First to work the same trick on a flat ceiling here. You'll hear how his forced-perspective technique, quadratura, only holds together from one exact spot on the floor, and what he did with false marble and gilding on the pillars around you. It ends with where Pozzo himself ended up, inside the very church he spent six years painting.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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