This is just the latest in a long series of posts about “Astronomy in Art & Architecture” (click here for the whole series). When I started writing on this topic, I thought it would be easy to find examples of astronomy in art and architecture, and that I would not write about finding something so simple as stars on a ceiling. But I was wrong. Even simple stars are not so common. Now when I find some, I notice. And St. Joseph Church in Jasper, Indiana has a nice bunch of them.
St. Joseph is a remarkable church. It sits atop the hill in Jasper, overlooking the town. Jasper is not a big place. It is the county seat of Dubois County. The total population of the county is under fifty thousand; Jasper is under twenty thousand. But as you can see from the photos below, this church would stand out in a good-sized metropolitan area.
Work on St. Joseph started in 1867, with the quarrying of local stone.* The pastor was Fr. Fidelis Maute, a Benedictine (the Benedictine archabbey of St. Meinrad is about a half-hour drive south of Jasper). All labor and building materials were provided by the parishioners, with different families working on the church each week as organized by Fr. Maute. The cornerstone was blessed and laid a year later. Work on the walls began in 1871 and continued for seven years, owing to the parish’s determination to not go into debt. The first mass was held in the church in 1880. Work on the steeple continued into the early twentieth century. In 1911, mosaics were added over the main and side altars.
It is around the altars that the stars are to be seen. Some stars are in the mosaics. Others are painted on the ceiling above the main altar.
The ceiling stars are not simply the homogeneous five-pointed stars typically seen in flags. They are much like what you see in charts of the night sky; they have differing sizes that presumably represent stars of differing brightness or “magnitude”.
These stars show at least three “magnitudes” of stars — bright stars, middling stars, and faint stars. However, the artist who painted the ceiling stars clearly was not an astronomer. In the real sky, there are only a handful of bright stars, many more stars of middling brightness, and lots and lots of faint stars. The St. Joseph ceiling stars contain way too many bright stars, and way too few faint stars, compared to the real night sky.
The mosaic artist, Joseph Hahn, was not aiming to imitate the real night sky at all. The mosaic stars, while not homogenous, are much more like flag stars than the ones on the ceiling. The mosaic over the north side altar, of the crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven by the Trinity, features a number of four-pointed and eight-pointed stars, and one each of six- and five-pointed stars.
The mosaic over the south side altar, of the marriage of Mary and Joseph, features stars that are more elaborate, symmetrical arrangements of mosaic tiles.
St. Joseph also has a very nice Our Lady of Guadalupe statue (and is working on an outdoor statue and garden — someone’s “Eagle Scout” project), and that has a lot of stars also. These are five-pointed stars, very similar to flag stars.
It’s a glorious church — and in fine condition thanks to a massive renovation that was completed in 2022. And it has that rare feature called astronomy in art and architecture!
*Historical information about St. Joseph comes from a guide pamphlet titled “St. Joseph Catholic Church” that was available in the church vestibule.
