Artist creates opportunities to enrich faith with virtual cathedral tours
Amy Giuliano will never forget her first trip to Rome with her Dad when she was eight. Or the journey to Istanbul at age 12 and walking into the Hagia Sophia, an architectural masterpiece with a massive dome. Formative family trips like these had a powerful impact on the 32-year-old’s Catholic faith.
“I remember when my Dad first brought me back to Italy, I was just amazed by the incredible art and architecture and how it tied in with our faith,” she said. “Those types of trips sparked my interest in learning more about my faith. I could learn so much about my faith through art.”
Giuliano, whose family is from Como in northern Italy, was born and raised in Connecticut. Her father is a permanent deacon and taught theology at the high school and university levels. After acquiring numerous degrees, Giuliano went on to follow in her father’s footsteps. She currently teaches classes at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., and Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.
During her studies at Seton Hall, Giuliano spent a semester abroad in Rome and fell in love with the city all over again. She worked part-time as a tour guide and helped visitors explore churches around the city. She discovered that people approach faith with their walls down when they’re in front of art and something beautiful.
“They wanted to hear about church history, and the symbolism, and what it meant,” she said. “I found that I could explain to tourists and pilgrims everything I was learning in my theology classes at the Angelicum in Rome(The Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas).
This included lessons on theology, church history, hagiography, liturgy, and significant theological truths like the Trinity.
“That was kind of when things clicked for me,” Giuliano said. “What I’d like to do is open up the world of our faith to people through beauty, through art and architecture by being able to explain it.”
While studying for her masters in Christian Art and Architecture at Yale University, Giuliano won an innovation prize from the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking for dreaming up the idea of virtual reality church tours. She was given funding and training to start up her company, Vadis VR, and back to Rome, she went.
Through virtual reality, Giuliano puts viewers directly inside church cathedral walls in an immersive experience that uses 3-D laser imagery and high-resolution 4K photography. To create these projects, Giuliano will spend hours locked in some of the world’s most impressive church cathedrals.
“I really love it,” Giuliano said of her work. “It’s been exciting.”
She recalled a special moment in Rome during the infancy of her new venture. There she was working alone inside the Basilica of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva when a group of Dominican Friars entered singing and praying vespers.
“As I’m methodically making my way through the Basilica, scanning each section slowly in the silence, they processed in and started singing the solemn Salve Regina – beautiful ancient prayers,” Giuliano said. “It was a incredible experience to be there amongst bodies of saints who were buried in the floor and the walls. Fra Angelico is buried there.”
The Newark Archdiocese recently commissioned Giuliano to create a virtual reality tour for the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark. A new Basilica website also was launched. It includes a link to the virtual reality tour, which was funded specifically through corporate donations supporting the project.
Giuliano said she enjoyed going up in a 50-foot lift for the Newark project to 3-D scan and photograph at the level of the chandeliers.
“The church is huge,” she said. “You already feel tiny in this immense space that surrounds you, but being high up in the lift shows you the grandeur and height of the ceiling.”
The Basilica is a 45-000 square-foot French Gothic Cathedral that shares many features with its European cousin, Notre-Dame de Paris. Pointed arches and vaulted ceilings are two of the hallmarks of the Gothic architectural style, and their use enabled architects to build to incredible heights that no one had ever seen before, Giuliano said.
“They are very, very tall structures,” she said. “It’s this idea of a movement up towards heaven, and I just got a sense of that being so high up because the level of the chandeliers is not even that high compared to the highest part of the ceiling. I thought that was amazing.”
Meaning, symbolism, and history are everywhere in the Basilica. It’s in the stained glass, the statues, woodwork, and art. Giuliano’s virtual reality tours are designed to tell the stories behind this rich iconography. By clicking on any of 100 “tour tags,” windows pop up containing text, photos, videos, and informational captions. This educational experience is a big part of why she was inspired to create the tours.
“I realized that so many of my students were never going to have the opportunity to travel to some of the places I had traveled to… and to have that type of experience enrich their understanding of their faith and church history, theology – all the things we were learning in class, Giuliano said.
This type of technology allows the user to move through the space as if they were there. It portrays a realistic sense of scale and context. Church virtual reality tours also allow a broader audience to access these incredible sites, she said.
“People can experience the beauty of these spaces from anywhere in the world, and they can learn about the meaning behind the art and architecture,” she said. “I think that our churches are meant to communicate something of the beauty and grandeur of God to the people who visit the church. When we as human beings encounter something beautiful, we also encounter God in some way.”
Featured image: The Newark Archdiocese commissioned Amy Giuliano to create a virtual reality tour for the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark. (Photo/Archdiocese of Newark)
This article was first published in the January/February 2020 edition of New Jersey Catholic.
