Gorgeous Shining Stars And Starry Night Sky Inside Cambridge’s Gothic King’s College Chapel

MessageToEagle.com – This is a truly extraordinary sight and you won’t see often. At a charity event held in the University of Cambridge, Paris-based digital projection artist Miguel Chevalier turned the university’s 16th-century King’s College Chapel into a stunning backdrop for his hypnotizing light show. The entire Chapel was filled with shining stars and other illuminated objects. It was almost as if you had the entire Universe just above your head.

As each speaker at the ‘Dear World… Yours, Cambridge’ event spoke about their topic, the chapel was filled with projections that artfully illustrated their points.

The projections, specially designed for the famous chapel’s interior, at times either emphasized or hid the building’s extraordinary architecture.

King’s College and its Chapel were founded by Henry VI (1421-71). In 1455 the Wars of the Roses broke out when Richard Duke of York challenged Henry’s right to the throne. The subsequent story of the building of the Chapel and the Wars of the Roses are closely intertwined. In 1461, Henry was taken prisoner and murdered in the Tower of London on 21 May 1471.

The new king, Edward IV, passed on to the College a little of the money that Henry had intended for his Chapel, but very little building was done in the 22 years between Henry’s imprisonment and the death of Edward IV in 1483.

 

Work began again through the generosity of Richard III, who was later to be popularly depicted as a sinister hunchback. Richard gave instructions that ‘the building should go on with all possible despatch’ and to ‘press workmen and all possible hands, provide materials and imprison anyone who opposed or delayed’. By the end of his reign the first six bays of the Chapel had reached full height and the first five bays, roofed with oak and lead, were in use.

The chapel is one of the best examples of Perpendicular Gothic architecture in the world, so its ornate decorations were worth seeing even before they served as a backdrop for Chevalier’s projections.

MessageToEagle.com

References:

Miguel Chevalier

Bored Panda

King’s College Cambridge