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Abstract
One of the fundamental artistic expressions of Christian thought and emotion is the vision of heaven depicted in painting or mosaic on domes, apsidal half-domes, and related vaulted forms. It is the culminating theme of the theological decoration of religious buildings from the beginnings of ecclesiastical art in the age of Constantine the Great throughout the entire development of Byzantine art. It survives in numerous varieties in the Western religious art of mediaeval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel and many ingenious contemporary and later ceiling decorations transfer this Early Christian and Byzantine scheme into the world of modern speculation and emotion; as Milton likewise achieved the great transposition of mediaeval cosmology into modern thought. Though the idea of interpreting the ceiling as the sky may be the result of a general and not unnatural association and though it also found expression outside the sphere of Western art,3 the specific forms and the systematic approach of Christian monumental art far transcend such general associations. In all their specialized varieties and applications, the Early Christian patterns of heaven on vaults and ceilings are united by a common systematic, centralized and organized approach, an approach which is cosmic in the triple sense of the Greek meaning of this term: it combines decorative ideals of formal beauty with an order of speculative reasoning and the concept of a permanently established world.