On Church Ceilings
- Ethan A. Hayes
- 15 hours ago
- 4 min read
The most exclaimed and especial virtue of churches is their lofty ceilings, usually unmatched except by some grand civic buildings. This is not by chance but design, and not in a merely banal way that "the ceiling represents the heavens", but due to strong particular reasons.
Man is a terrestrial creature and in his mind he is accustomed mostly to look horizontally across the surface of the ground. This is a strong custom of man's mind which structures how he perceives the world. As he is not a bird or a small free climbing creature like an insect, height is measured judiciously. This is to say that man overestimates heights, radically and significantly so. He is made to do so because to do otherwise is terribly expensive. He can climb somewhat, and he can jump and throw, and engage in other intelligent endeavors involving height, but to misjudge these distances could be catastrophic.
This hypothesis is not mere conjecture. Götz Martius
in 1889 first discovered and measured that size alone is overestimated at a distance of as little as 20 feet by as much as 10%. E. Schur and F. Beryl in 1926 separately confirmed and furthered his finding showing that multidimensional objects experienced this worse compared to flat ones, children as young as 2 experienced this as did adults, that the effect can be as great as a 50% overestimation, and that most importantly, vertical distances were much more susceptible than were horizontal ones. According to K. Koffka in 1832-35, the summarizer of these prior men and a father of Gestalt Psychology, at any less than little more than 13 feet, the effect is minimal, but beyond roughly 15-45 feet the effect is especially strong and does not weaken until as much as 220 feet.
The implications from this information is that in buildings of substantial distances and heights, the efficiency of their size is rewarded heavily. Normally in engineering, size is a demanding foe. To build an altar piece 20 feet high is much more than twice as difficult to build one a mere 10 feet high, et cetera. The square-cube law has no mercy. However, due to the overestimations of the human eye, a 20 foot altarpiece might feel as if it is 2 feet taller than it really is.
The judicious church builder can use this efficiency toward his benefit. He would know that the most rewards will be for creating heights more than 15 feet tall, ideally as much as 45 feet tall. This closely matches the real practice of churches, where even the smallest village churches have ceilings in the upper end of this range. For the cathedral builder, the utility extends. Building a high dome or spacious transept is efficiently rewarded up to 220 feet. Now the tallest nave ever built was Beauvais Cathedral at 156 feet, but this was straining physical engineering limitations at the time so that the year 1600, after 375 years of troubled construction, further efforts were halted and the nave left incomplete. 150 feet seemed to be a rough limit for the European builders. Only in central domes such as Florence's Duomo and St. Peter's in Rome is the full efficiency of the phenomenon able to be used, often with domes well exceeding 300 feet.
Further, complex ceiling decoration, such as ribs, bosses, and coffered ceilings magnify this effect. These architectural features are not mere structural efficiencies, (some such as most modern bosses, no longer serve any mechanical purpose at all.) And while ribbed groin vaults are necessary for many structures, by lavishly decorating them in a way that seems contrary to efficiency of structure is actually more efficient in terms of phenomenological space. Nothing the church does is irrational.
Now concerning color, if one is to step around the simple answer that 'blue is the color of the sky' or whatnot, one finds an equal wealth of sensitive instinct on the part of the cathedral builders. Blue is in fact a common color of church ceiling, even the mosques of the pagans employ it, but this is common because it is human, helpful, and effective.
Firstly it is true that the color of the sky is blue, and the sky is up, but this takes the cart before the horse. Rather the it seems to science that the human mind is wired to perceived blue as up and distant (Jones 1856). Modern thinking, does not digest symbols as real, this is such a symbol, and the difference of thinking is subtle and hard to escape. It is true that the sky is blue, but that is only meaningful if the symbolists are right that it isn't all arbitrary show. The sky is blue and blue has the properties of upness and highness in it. Therefore, the sky is inherently up and high. The intelligent sanity of the medievals should be obvious now, blueness is not the sky; upness is not the sky. Rather the sky is blue, and the sky is up.
With this conclusion, the implementation of blue into church ceilings is a perfect use. Phenomenologically, to create the best space of capturing heaven and escaping an unspiritualized and earthly view blue coloration is natural, not because of the sky, that is is coincidental, but because it is best. The use of blue, especially in the recessed areas according to Jones, creates a super real depth as an emergent property that is not inherently to the material or geometric arrangement. Blue pigment in earlier days was not cheap in either as we have discussed elsewhere. They suffered these heavy costs knowing that they would find heaven come down to them through it.
The skeptic can look at the terribly high, inefficient, and expensive ceilings of the world's churches and sneer, but this is unfounded criticism. What seems to be profligate excess, is strictly what it claims to be: a door to heaven. To judge previous ages as simple is to heap that same criticism onto our own modern heads.
Bibliography:
F. Beryl, 1926, Über die Grössenauffassung bei Kindren. Zts. f. Psych. 100, pp. 344-371
O. Jones, 1856, Grammar of Ornament, props 17 and 21)
K. Koffka, 1936, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, ch. 3
E. Schur, 1926, Mondtäuschung und Sehgrössenkonstanz. Psych. Forsch. 7, pp. 44-80
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