On the occasion of the study day "Connecting the fake with the real" Andrea Pozzo: theory and practice in the architectural project of Sant'Ignazio to be held on Friday 3 December 2021 in the Church of Sant'Ignazio, from Tuesday 30 November to Sunday 5 December 2021 , the National Galleries of Ancient Art in collaboration with the Roma Tre University exceptionally exhibit the two sketches relating to the? nta dome and the a ? fresco of the vault of the Church of Sant'Ignazio made by Andrea Pozzo (Trento 1642 - Vienna 1709).

In 1685 Andrea Pozzo painted a canvas inside the church of Sant'Ignazio di Loyola in Rome that evokes the presence of a real dome, one of the emblematic examples of the level reached in those years in the field of illusory representation. Also in Sant'Ignazio, between 1691 and 1694, the artist frescoes the vault of the central nave with the complex and grandiose Allegory of the missionary work of the Society of Jesus .

The sketches of the two works, coming from the Jesuit Roman College, were purchased by the State in 1895 and are now kept in Palazzo Barberini.

The mock-up of the fake dome (c. 1685, 100 x 95 cm) is the model used by Pozzo to convince the Rector of the Roman College, Father Silvestro Mauro, of the goodness of the illusionistic effect. The multispectral investigations conducted by Antonio Camassa and Giuseppe Fabretti of the Central Institute for Restoration made it possible to clarify how the model was also essential for setting the drawing on the final work and to clarify the technique of execution of the painter who he used charcoal traces drawn with the help of a string, while the more minute details (such as the capitals) were made with the help of a metallic stylus. The investigations also revealed some characters no longer visible today - AP F -, perhaps the painter's signature, confirming what was already reported by a nineteenth-century inscription on the back of the canvas: " Original sketch of the cuppola of S. Ignazio in Rome, painted in 1685 by the f. ° Andrea Pozzo of the Society of Jesus. This painting in the southern church has totally disappeared. 1884 ". At that time, in fact, the dome must now have been completely blackened by the lampblack of the candles and thus be substantially invisible.

The large sketch relating to the vault , on the other hand, is perhaps to be recognized in the work that according to the biographer Leone Pascoli (1736) the painter exhibited in the Sala del Collegio Romano "on public view and universal censorship". Also in this case, the investigations made it possible to better understand the spatial construction used by Pozzo for its complex composition.

Pozzo's two sketches will be accompanied by the projection of a video made by Antonio Camassa and Matteo Flavio Mancini (Roma Tre University), which presents the results of the multispectral investigations carried out on the canvases and on the geometric layout of the works in comparison with the realizations finals painted by Pozzo in the church of Sant'Ignazio.