While walking through Notre Dame, I noticed that in one of the chapels the ceiling was painted with gold stars on a blue background. This struck me as a bit odd, considering that most of the paint work in Notre Dame had a quite visibly religious theme.
At the end of the day I was still thinking about it and that was when I remembered that I had seen a similar ceiling in the Vatican Museum last summer, yellow/gold stars on blue background. This got me to wondering what the deal was with starry painted ceilings and so I set to scouring the internet for answers.
It was revealed to me that many churches, especially medieval churches, had that sort of decoration. According to who you’re listening to the reason could be that the ceiling of a temple should make on recall the open skies of nature’s temple or that it represents the heavens. With my vague knowledge of catholicism, I’d probably lean towards the later, given the church’s habit of representing the divine in holy spaces. The practice appears to have been widespread, with even the sistine chapel originally bearing the motif, before Michelangelo went to work.
Perhaps the most interesting thing I found was that the practice of painting a starry sky on the ceilings of churches was noted by Viollet-le-duc in Dictionnaire de l’Architecture, which I suppose can help explain its reappearance in the Notre Dame after it was white washed in the time of Louis XIV.