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Hawksmoor's Ceiling, Mercator's Projection and the Roman Pantheon

The ceiling of the Buttery in All Souls College, Oxford, designed by the English Baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, has a vaulted form on an oval base. It is coffered with an array of approximately square sunken lacunaria, whose sizes and positions vary so as to accommodate the constraints of the curved surface and its boundaries. A similar design appears in the dome of the Roman Pantheon. Using methods of differential geometry, we hypothesise that these cofferings should be the images under conformal mappings of regular square tilings of a rectangle or finite cylinder. This guarantees that the coffer ribs meet exactly at right angles and the coffers are close to being square. These mappings are simply the inverse of Mercator's projection of the curved surface onto a plane. For a ceiling which is a general surface of revolution, we derive formulae for the dimensions and location of each coffer. Our results, taking into account camera distortion, are in excellent agreement with photographs of the Hawksmoor ceiling and the Pantheon dome, as well as with recent direct measurements of the latter. We also describe a protocol by which Hawksmoor's ceiling might have been constructed without advanced mathematics.