Catherine McCormack - The Art of Looking Up

The starry vault of Sainte-Chapelle, the royal chapel within the Palais de la Cit, consecrated in 1248. Soaring Gothic architecture draws the gaze and mind upwards to an imagined divine firmament, while light filters through the radiant polychromatic stained glass to create an experience of heaven on earth.

This relationship with the sky leads to the prevalence of the colour blue in many examples of ceiling art, from the mosaics of Ravenna to Cy Twomblys ocean of azure in the Louvre Museum, known only as The Ceiling, or the inimitable blue of Gladys Deacons eyes as they glare down imposingly from the North Portico of Blenheim Palace with an otherworldliness that is firmly secular. It is worth remembering that, in painting the blue of the sky, we have had to mine the ground for the precious lapis lazuli pigment that in fifteenth-century Florence produced the colour considered to be the most perfect, illustrious and beautiful (according to Italian artist Cennino Cennini). Although the story of painting the sky is a story of blue, this is not the only colour to be found here, rendered in materials that range from glass to mosaic and stone and even the wing cases of scarab beetles. Lets not forget that, while we are looking up, figures in the images above are looking down on us. The techniques of sotto in su (from below to above) and trompe loeil (trick of the eye) are intended to terrify, inspire and entertain, making spectators flinch as they anticipate the overspill of the illusory world of the painting into their own space. This relationship between looking up and what is below plays out in Giulio Romanos Sala dei Giganti in Palazzo del Te, Mantua, in which the sky gods of Mount Olympus battle with the mysterious forces of the primordial earth in the form of the giants.

There is a conspicuous absence of women artists in the book. This does not reflect a lack of capability among women, but rather a dearth of opportunity throughout the history of art. For women across all continents and cultures were prohibited from the art-academy training that typically led to commissions in the public and private spaces that feature in this book from the grand contracts to embellish the palaces of the wealthy and powerful to the religious buildings that defined the state, or the political halls of the establishment order. And there is no way of knowing the gender of the anonymous artisans of mosaic and stonework whose work is their silent testimony in places such as the Neonian Baptistery or at the Alhambra and Topkap palaces.

Painting as an art in itself, and also one that combined poetry and intellect, was considered a male profession. Indeed, there was even a taxonomy of masculinity within painting in Italian art theory of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries one in which fresco was considered the most virile painting technique, reserved for such spaces as the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, or the smaller vault of the Palazzo Farnese in the same city, or the triumphalist all-encompassing world view of Tiepolos staircase in the Wrzburg Residence.

There are a few exceptions to this gendered rule, examples that fell through the gaps, but that history has not devoted enough attention to until recently. For example, Artemisia Gentileschi (15931653) was born into a family of male painters and learnt her profession with her brothers in her fathers studio. A successful artist in her own right, she joined her father in London to paint the nine canvases of the Allegory of Peace for the ceiling of the Queens House in Greenwich, a work that is now installed in Marlborough House, London. But her contribution has been squabbled over in the scholarly archive, with the voices that dispute her hand as vocal as those who attest her presence. Founding member of the Royal Academy in Britain, in 1768, Angelica Kauffman (17411807) was a self-professed history painter. The most illustrious category an artist could identify as, this was almost exclusively reserved for male painters by virtue of the fact that women were prohibited from studying nude models fundamental to painting in the academic style. Kauffman painted four images known as the