Over the Top – Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

Webster’s Dictionary defines a cupola as "a rounded vault resting on a usually circular base and forming a roof or a ceiling." In other words, it is literally over the top.

The ceiling above the rotunda of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is also "over the top" in the collquial sense of the term. When he was commissioned to create decorations for a library entrance, the ceiling above the grand stairway and the dome of the gallery's rotunda, artist John Singer Sargent chose as the theme of his creations a celebration of the arts. Sargent (1856-1925) was an American expatriate who was trained in Paris prior to moving to London where he found fame as a portraitist of America's Gilded Age and Edwardian England. He worked for almost 10 years on the commission in a rented Boston studio, where he constructed a model of the dome and experimented with decorative schemes using plaster studies. When his decorations were unveiled at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1925, reviewers compared his achievement with that of Michelangelo. Sargent never saw the final installation, however, having died in London on the eve of his departure to Boston.

Rather than creating his murals as frescoes – that is, applying the paint directly to wet plaster walls – Sargent produced monumental oil paintings in his studios in London and in Boston’s South End. The finished canvases were then adhered to the Museum’s walls. Sargent also created plaster reliefs, the frames for his paintings and sculptures, the ornaments that adorn the spandrels, and even the classical-style urns and sphinxes in the balconies above the rotunda’s three doorways.

To complement the building’s classically influenced architecture, Sargent depicted scenes from ancient mythology. He also invented subjects using mythological figures to illustrate the Museum’s role as guardian of the arts. The key painting – the first work of art that visitors see as they ascend the grand staircase – features Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, turning away a figure representing Time, while sheltering with her cape three personifications of the visual arts: Sculpture (left); Painting (right); and, in the pose of Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna (one of Sargent’s many quotations from great art of the past), Architecture.