Cupola vault

The painting in the cupola vault represents the Heaven of All Saints with Assumption.

With obvious borrowings from Correggio's cupola painting in Parma, Lanfranco produced in Sant'Andrea della Valle, for the fist time in Rome, an illusionistic composition consisting solely of foreshortened figures, presenting a fictive opening into heaven above the crossing. A mass of innumerable figures is grouped in two concentric circles around the bright lantern, where Christ reaches down toward the Virgin, who lifts her arm to him in turn, borne upward on a bank of clouds by countless angels.

Lanfranco's cupola became a successful prototype for Roman Baroque, one that inspired an extraordinary numbers of imitations.