Vassar College shows Steve Taylor's Virtual Sistine Chapel

Friday, 31 August 2007 20:50

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY - After two months of steadily piecing together the project -- an hour here, a couple of hours there -- Steve Taylor's creation, a virtual Sistine Chapel went live on July 2. That day he sent an announcement to an international mailing list for educators using Second Life. Now eight weeks later, there have been more than 3,000 visits."

With estimates of 1.6 million people worldwide actively participating and interacting in Second Life, Vassar's Sistine Chapel has crystallized for many people the best educational possibilities of the online technology.

"Many visitors have told us how beautiful our version of the Sistine is, but I remind them that Michelangelo had a hand in that. One blogger suggested that this may be the 'killer app' for education in Second Life," said Taylor. " People who have been to the real chapel have e-mailed us that this reminds them of being there, except for the lack of crowds and rushing. Of course, they also like being able to fly up to the ceiling for a close inspection, or to sit on a windowsill."

Freedom of movement from floor to ceiling, and from the seas through the clouds, is one of the liberating aspects of Second Life, which has some of the look and feel of a sophisticated video game. Participants create a virtual character, an "avatar," to move among various locations that fellow participants are creating in this collaborative world, and to converse in these locales with one another.

Vassar College is among the earliest colleges to explore the educational potential of Second Life, with art history, computer science, and cognitive science professors already employing the technology in their courses. Applications for many other disciplines are also being considered, including foreign language learning, since, as Taylor points out, "There are Second Life participants from all over the world interested in conversing."

In fact, some of Taylor's earlier work with a historian of the Italian Renaissance moved him to pursue the creation of a Sistine Chapel in Second Life. Already several art historians who have visited the virtual chapel have e-mailed to say that they expect to use the site in their courses in the coming year.

Taylor explained that his elaborate digital construction was far more feasible because, "The Sistine Chapel is probably one of the most photographed buildings in the world, so it was easy to find digital images of the major artworks on the web." [The Web Gallery of Art was one of his major resources.] "It was more difficult to find photographs of the less important areas, like the pilasters between the paintings and of the floor, which I had to reconstruct from many different photos."

Steve Taylor also included something most visitors don’t see when they visit the Sistine Chapel in person: the tapestries Pope Leo X commissioned Raphael to design for the space between 1515 and 1516. Raphael’s cartoons were woven into scenes of the lives of St. Peter and St. Paul in Brussels, and hung on the Sistine’s walls by 1524. Today, however, they are rarely displayed in the Sistine Chapel for the public to view.

Most of Vassar's re-created Sistine Chapel is comprised of rectangular prisms, each with a single photographic image. None of the images is greater than 512 pixels wide or tall, so to make sure the visual resolution was adequate, each rectangle typically has one painting on it. "Below the ceiling line, the building is basically a box, so I built the chapel by putting a lot of these rectangles next to each other, I simulated the curve of the ceiling by using a lot of flat pieces," Taylor continued. "There are also arched windows and semicircular paintings (lunettes) above them. The most difficult pieces to construct were the curved spandrels and pendentives that connect the lunettes to the ceiling."

Visit Vassar College at: www.vassar.edu