La costruzione della scena prospettica. Teorie proiettive e prassi operativa.

In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, scenography played a central role with respect to the applications of perspective. The scenic space was, in fact, the setting dedicated to the creation of illusion, where the projective operations underlying the construction of perspective took physical form. These operations were materialised using ropes, rods, and lamps to project the perspective image onto the picture planes of the telari. This concept of the stage as a full-scale perspective laboratory stimulated the experimental and speculative interest of perspectivists and mathematicians, who enriched manuals and treatises on perspective with operational solutions. The cross-sectional analysis of these contributions, from the Renaissance origins of a perspective displaced in space and fragmented across the picture planes of the telari, to the definition of the perspective system in the mutable Baroque stage, has led to the identification of a perspective practice based on the use of projecting planes, through which the perspectivists of the time controlled the perspective images of straight lines generally oriented in space. The reconstruction of projective methods for the realisation of perspective scenes reflects the strong connection between projective theories and operational practice, which, straddling art and science, fuelled perspective research during this period.