Illusion of St. Peter's

For Painting, this week has mostly been a work week. We didn't go anywhere exciting for sketching or general exploring. Instead, we were working on our actual class (What?!? Weird!), which consists of two projects. The first one is a group picture. We've split up a painting ("Judith Slaying Holofernes")

into 12 pieces (3 across, 4 down). My piece is the bottom right corner. We did a charcoal drawing, lined them up, and now we're working on the canvases, using the same technique as the artist.

Art History has been much more exciting. On Tuesday we went to 3 different churches, including seeing the original foundations from the 300's.

Today we went to St. Peter's. The optical illusion inside is hard to describe but amazing to see.

Because of the scale of the space in relation to the size of the statues, the 22' tall marble people look like they're maybe 10'; the canopy of the alter appears maybe 25' tall when it's actually 10 stories! Is sounds weird (how could something that's actually so big look so small, even from 30' away?), but it's true.

We didn't have time to climb the dome or go into the museum, so there's already talk of returning some afternoon when we have some free time.