Church of Saint-Bruno des Chartreux

This guide to the Church of Saint-Bruno des Chartreux in Lyon centers on a race against drying plaster in 1738, when the Italian stage designer Giovanni Niccolo Servandoni had his crew drape and pleat sheets of soaked cloth above the altar before the paste could set hard. It traces his background building illusions for the Paris Opera, where painted canvas fooled audiences in an instant, and what he was attempting to turn permanent above the marble columns here instead. The dome above the chapel was finished a few years later, under the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot.