Illusion & Imagination: Pictorial Decorations for Architectural Spaces, 1500-1800

Depicting foreshortened figures and employing dramatic perspective, Renaissance and Baroque painters created convincing illusions on church ceilings and palace walls. This exhibition showcases drawings artists used to develop and record ideas for paintings that filled grand architectural spaces. Often the boundary between the real and the imagined is blurred in these works, allowing viewers a glimpse into the creative process in which artists’ imaginations and actual spaces intermingle.