Ceiling painting: feast for the senses under Baroque dome

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Before their discovery, the two canvases had been languishing in storage at the Alte Pinakothek art museum in Munich. Up close, they are not particularly impressive – the colors appear dull and matte, and in some places they are no longer preserved in their original form. Moreover, the proportions of some of the body parts look off. The works belong to the ceiling painting that once adorned the Lusthaus (‘Pleasure House’) of the Munich Residence palace. This building, which has not existed for 200 years, stood on the site of today’s Bavarian State Chancellery. People were astonished when a team led by LMU art historian Stephan Hoppe reconstructed a 3D model of the Lusthaus – complete with this ceiling painting – as part of a university seminar.

The team virtually recreated the ceiling in collaboration with the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ). Hoppe vividly remembers the moment he saw the results: “I’m standing there in the new LED cave at the computing center. I look up and see the ceiling painting as if I was standing in a real room. The images are so sharp that the brain says: I’m there.” When shown in their proper setting and perspective like this, the illusionistic effect and artistic value of the paintings become apparent. Thanks to the artist’s skill, it is as if the ceiling opens on to the heavens.

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Baroque ceiling paintings are often described as a form of ‘space creation’ (Raumschöpfung). This is not only due to their sheer size – the expansive works even adorn grand halls and monumental staircases – rather they are also designed with multiple perspectives. In this way, they enter into dynamic interplay with the entire space, including its other paintings, furnishings, and elements such as mirrors.

“Ceiling paintings unfold within the space. In many of these rooms, the work cannot be fully taken in from a single viewpoint, unlike standing in front of a Rembrandt painting in a museum. There is the concept of the ‘total artwork’ (Gesamtkunstwerk), which is always controversial, but which describes how various art forms work together. In this case, the painting on the ceiling relates to the room itself and to the viewer’s standpoint. At the same time, it interacts with other aspects that researchers have not yet been able to fully explore,” explains Hoppe. “The very fact that they are spatial in nature and large in scale means that ceiling paintings have quite different cognitive effects on observers than, say, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Until now, it has been very difficult for scholars to treat this aspect of their form in a scientifically reproducible way.”

Preserving cultural heritage

Hoppe and his team are using state-of-the-art technologies to study ceiling paintings, thereby generating new insights and opening up new avenues of inquiry. The project launched ten years ago as part of the Academies Programme, when it began digitally documenting Baroque ceiling paintings in Germany that were created between 1550 and 1800 in palaces and residences, as well as in churches and manor houses. To date, the project has produced 13,500 digital recordings of ceiling paintings from 530 buildings at 350 locations. These are available to both the research community and the general public on the project website (https://www.deckenmalerei.eu).

“We’re essentially a virtual museum,” says Hoppe, who, together with his team and the help of modern technology, is creating something that was previously impossible. After all, Baroque ceiling paintings cannot be exhibited in regular museums. “A large part of the infrastructure within which our discipline conducts its research – that is to say, museums – will never devote itself to this art form. As such, we’re tending to a piece of our cultural heritage that does not fit the museum setup and has always been endangered. Many works have been lost to fire and war, as the paintings are very difficult to store. That is why we’ve always insisted: Our 3D reproductions and photo series are documentations.”

All ceiling paintings documented in the project are given inventory numbers, as they would in a museum, and are also recorded within the framework of the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museum) initiative, which makes knowledge available in the digital space in conjunction with Wikimedia: https://www.wikimedia.de/projekte/glam/

From 3D models to AI and simulations

As well as opening up new opportunities for documentation and research, the technological developments of recent years have also continually presented the project team with new challenges. “When we started out back then and created a 3D model of the Imperial Hall in Bamberg, the computing time needed to process the data translated into a five-figure sum in euros. Just two years later, you could do the processing on a cellphone,” recalls Hoppe. “Ten years ago, we couldn’t possibly have foreseen that we’d be able to collect the sheer volume of data we have today. And now, of course, artificial intelligence has come on the scene. We have vast amounts of data, and that calls for AI and pattern recognition. As art historians, we can ask questions about style and motifs, but many aspects of a work are either inaccessible to human understanding alone, or can only be apprehended with great difficulty.”

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To unlock the technological possibilities, Hoppe embraces interdisciplinary cooperation. “This has brought us into intellectual exchange with other disciplines. One of the questions is what theoretical progress results from this. You have to be able to forge relationships with the people who are pursuing these questions in other disciplines,” says Hoppe, who has since delved into various topics outside his area of expertise, such as the cognition and functionality of AI. The team is also collaborating with professorships at LMU that were created as part of the German High-Tech Agenda. “We now have researchers from a wide variety of different fields coming to us because of our use of innovative techniques.” To build up skills in methodological approach and the use of new technologies, the team is fostering the development of early-career researchers.

Today, it is possible not only to create 3D reconstructions of ceiling paintings like the one that adorned the Lusthaus, but also to simulate them. And these simulations engender new research questions, such as: For what light conditions were the ceiling paintings created? And how should we observe them?

To this end, Hoppe and his team are cooperating in the EU-wide COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) network (as one of the few projects from the humanities), with an increasing focus on questions of sense perception in historical spaces.

Overwhelming impressions

“In previous photo books, the ceiling paintings appear very bright,” explains Dr. Matteo Burioni, coordinator of the project and head of the research group in Munich. “With almost jarring colors. But we see them today in industrial light. Perhaps the artists back then were struggling against poor light conditions. After all, the ceiling wasn’t directly lit in those days.”

Moreover, the ceiling paintings in banqueting halls were presumably observed not so much during daylight as during evening festivities. Burioni and Hoppe remember a conference organized by the Rudolstadt Working Group on Residence Culture, when a festive room in the New Palace in Potsdam – a building for large celebrations and guests during the summers of the kings of Prussia – was illuminated with candles.

“You make surprising discoveries in our research that you could not have imagined beforehand. You walk along in darkness until you reach a room with lavish porcelain displays, radiantly illuminated by endlessly reflecting surfaces. It’s an overwhelming experience,” recalls Burioni. “With the help of simulations, we’ll be able to discover many things in the future,” he adds.

In the Baroque ceiling painting project, the team is already beginning, in collaboration with the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, to place more emphasis on these effects on the senses and, as a first step, to simulate the lighting.

Flow of ideas in Europe

The new methods also allow researchers to uncover the knowledge and skills of the artists of that era. Techniques of perspective and vision had been the subject of theoretical discussion since the 15th century. “In the early modern period, there were handbooks on how to construct such a painting,” explains Stephan Hoppe. First, the artist made sketches and then transferred them to a cartoon. “Early modern art differs from the art of the Middle Ages, because there is paper. The cartoons were fixed to the ceiling at full size and the composition was traced out by means of rough incisions. We’re now able to digitally reconstruct these incisions. The scans are so precise that we can subtract the color and see the preliminary drawing, the structural damage, and the cracks.”

Suddenly researchers can perceive and investigate so much more thanks to the new technologies. Before now, it was difficult to ascertain, for example, whether ceiling paintings were illuminated similarly in different palaces. With the aid of artificial intelligence, they can now find patterns and also differences in all kinds of aspects. “This brings us back to core elements of our discipline: What is design actually? I appreciate that a lot,” says Hoppe.

The digital images thus allow scholars to gain a better understanding of the technical processes, but also of how knowledge of them spread in Europe at the time. Hoppe talks of a “flow of ideas” and “social learning”.

“Baroque ceiling paintings are not isolated works of the imagination, rather emerged in the context of artistic peregrinations,” observes Hoppe. The researchers also want to document these early mechanisms of cultural exchange and knowledge transmission in their project. To this end, they are digitally recording all previously created documentation on the individual rooms and any earlier restorations. “This produces a digital catalog. We see how artists organized their affairs and how they migrated, what they read, and how and in what media their clients expressed their wishes for the project.

The knowledge graph on the website provides an initial overview of current knowledge about the ceiling paintings and their relationships, displayed in the form of a network.

“For us, digitalization has been a truly successful model for engaging with the public,” observes Hoppe. “People used to think that digital aspects would distract from the original. But in reality, many people have only discovered the works in the first place because they are digitally accessible.”

Baroque ceiling painting is an art form that is part of a living environment. Stephan Hoppe invites people to dive in: “The paintings offer exotic sensory impressions for people today. Through ceiling painting, we gain a better understanding of other worlds as well as our cultural heritage.”

THE PROJECT:

The Corpus of Baroque Ceiling Painting in Germany is funded by the German federal government as well as the state governments of Bavaria and Hesse through the Academies Programme. It is a project of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, with research offices at the Institute of Art History at LMU Munich and the German Documentation Center for Art History – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

All recorded data, documentation, photos, and simulations are made freely available on the online publication platform. To this end, the project team collaborates with Wikimedia/Wikidata to facilitate global data connectivity instead of creating new digital silos. As a result, the data links automatically to the data of other projects worldwide.

Regarding the publication platform, visit: https://www.deckenmalerei.eu

Zur Person:

Prof. Dr. Stephan Hoppe is Professor of Art History at LMU with a special interest in Bavarian art history, architectural history, and digital art history. He heads the Corpus of Baroque Ceiling Painting in Germany project:

PD Dr. Matteo Burioni is project coordinator and heads the project’s Munich office.

Further Links:

Leibniz Supercomputing Centre – Centre for Virtual Reality and Visualisation

Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities: project website for Corpus of Baroque Ceiling Painting in Germany

Tips for further reading:

The Corpus of Baroque Ceiling Painting in Germany is a project with a strong interdisciplinary focus. Its art historians read well beyond the boundaries of their fields. The following brief selection conveys an idea of the breadth of their inquiries:

Daniel C. Dennett: From Bacteria to Bach and Back – The Evolution of Minds. W. W. Norton 2017

Tom Griffiths: The Laws of Thought – The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind. Henry Holt 2026

Max S. Bennett: A Brief History of Intelligence – Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains. Mariner Books 2023