F E A T U R E S    Issue 2.10 - October 1996

From Ceiling to Cave

By Steve Shipside



The walls of La Cathédrale d'Images, a cavernous quarry at Baux-de-Provence, are currently being used as screens for multimedia shows - 4,000 square metres of them. The paintings of the Sistine Chapel - the basis for one of the shows - have been put through Photoshop filters that "peel away" layers of working to reveal otherwise invisible details. Dots around the nose of God, for example, indicate that the painter may have worked on card or material first, and then used pins to transfer the detail from the templates to plaster. The shoddy letter spacing in Michaelangelo's text has been corrected by painting over - a tribute to the lamentable lack of an auto-kern feature in Renaissance fresco.