ATLAS through the eyes of artist Josef Kristofoletti

The ATLAS mural at CERN was painted by artist Josef Kristofoletti. The large wall close to the entrance to the ATLAS control room, was only big enough for a painting in scale 1:2.

A few years ago, people in the ATLAS Experiment discovered that mural artist Josef Kristofoletti had created a mural of the ATLAS detector at a museum in South Carolina. He told us that he had seen Italian Renaissance frescoes depicting religious mythology, and that inspired by the creativity that goes into research at the frontiers of knowledge, he decided to paint a mural of ATLAS. He has referred to ATLAS as "an unprecedented cathedral of science." He was impressed by its epic nature, scale and concept.

We invited Kristofoletti to CERN where he painted a three-story-tall mural of the ATLAS experiment on the walls of the building where the experiment is housed (the mural is half the size of the actual detector). The mural also shows an event image occurring in the detector. A webcam recorded this months long project.