Sant'Ignazio & Pozzo's Illusion: The Fake Dome

Why is it significant?

Step into the nave of the Church of Sant'Ignazio di Loyola and walk until you find a circular marble disc set into the floor of the central aisle.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step into the nave of the Church of Sant'Ignazio di Loyola and walk until you find a circular marble disc set into the floor of the central aisle. Stand directly on this yellow marble disc and look straight up: the flat ceiling above you appears to dissolve into a soaring, hundred-foot marble colonnade opening into the heavens, where Saint Ignatius is received into paradise surrounded by floating angels!

Jesuit painter and mathematician Andrea Pozzo created this masterpiece of trompe-l'œil perspective between sixteen eighty-five and sixteen ninety-four. Every pillar, arch, and soaring cloud is an optical illusion painted onto a flat plaster ceiling, designed to appear perfectly three-dimensional only when viewed from this single exact stone.

Walk fifty feet further toward the altar and look up at the dark dome above the transept. It looks like a magnificent stone cupola with coffered ribs. But take several steps to the side: the dome warps and distorts! There is actually no dome at all: when funds ran out in sixteen eighty-five, Pozzo painted a perspective illusion of a dome onto a flat seventeen-meter canvas stretched across the ceiling.

Check your reflection in the large tilted floor mirror before heading east toward the roar of the Trevi Fountain.