In our excitement about last year’s World Cup we missed this fabulous Adidas ad which graced the ceiling of the main Cologne train station, Hauptbahnhof. Even so we’re thrilled to find it now and to admire it for its brilliant invention upon the Baroque ceiling painting found in Rome’s church of Sant’Ignazio.
Soccer stars (all Adidas-sponsored, of course) replace saints and they find heavenly delight in kicking a host of soccer balls towards the heavens. Among the players who transcend bounds of earthly time and space are David Beckham (Real Madrid and England), Kaka (AC Milan and Brazil), German national team captain Michael Ballack (Chelsea FC) and his team mate Lukas Podolski (FC Bayern Munich), Zinedine Zidane (Real Madrid and France), Raul (Real Madrid and Spain), Lionel Messi (FC Barcelona and Argentina), Juan Roman Riquelme (Villareal CF and Argentina), Nakamura (Celtic Glasgow and Japan) and Djibril Cisse (Liverpool FC and France).
It took Hamburg-based illustrator Felix Reidenbach 40 days to complete this pantheon of soccer gods and he must have made a serious study of Fra Andrea Pozzo’s 17th century fresco of The Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius in Sant’Ignazio. Just as Reidenbach’s train-station soccer gods appear to be making an ascent into the heavens, the breath-taking perspective of Pozzo’s mind-boggling church vault makes the viewer believe that they’ve entered the church just in time to see Saint Ignatius being raised to heaven amidst a crowd of angels and saints.
