Imaging Heaven: The Art and Architecture of Illusion

Arthur Becker returned to creating art late in his business career. At this time, his work investigated cultural materialism and the connection of pop‑culture symbols of money and status to contemporary social values. While his commitment to photography had been ongoing since his undergraduate training, the themes explored in Imaging Heaven first emerged during an incidental visit to Rome, where he encountered the quadratura “faux Pantheon” dome in the Jesuit church of Sant’Ignazio. Since then, Becker has embarked on a sustained photographic project documenting both familiar and more obscure ceiling paintings in churches and other buildings across Italy and Catholic Europe, the results of which form the core of Imaging Heaven. Dr. Daniel Sherer (PhD, Harvard University, 2000) teaches architectural history and theory at Princeton University School of Architecture (SoA). His areas of research include Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture; modern architecture in Europe and the United States; modern receptions of humanist architecture; Italian modern architecture and its interactions with art and design; modern architecture and film; and historiography and theory, with an emphasis on Manfredo Tafuri. His translation of Tafuri’s Ricerca del Rinascimento: principi, città, architetti (Turino: Einaudi, 1992), which was published in English as Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), won the Sir Nikolaus Pevsner Book Award. He has published widely in European and American journals including AA Files, Artforum, Art Journal, Assemblage, Domus, Journal of Architecture, JSAH, Log, Perspecta, Potlatch, Studi e Ricerche di storia dell’architettura, Vesper, and Zodiac. In 2018 he curated the exhibition Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City, at Princeton SoA. In 2022–23, he was Visiting Professor in Architectural History and Theory in the Dipartimento di Culture del Progetto, Iuav University of Venice. He is the 2026 Visiting Professor in the Dipartimento di Architettura e Studi Urbani, Politecnico di Milano.