Pompei: un trattato antico di prospettiva

The famous essay written by Panofsky on the perspective as ‘symbolic form’ has influenced the studies on the perspective knowledge of the ancients and still influences the current opinions regarding this subject. Nevertheless Panofsky examined only the convergence of the images of parallel straight-lines, totally neglecting other important characters of the perspective image, like the decreasing of the apparent sizes and the projective transformations of the circle. His deductions, besides, are purely intuitive and they are not founded on scientific method. It seems, therefore, right to apply the current methods and the current research techniques to the study of the perspectives in Pompei and Oplontis, as well as to those recovered on the Palatine, because a more careful reading of these testimonies can bring new contributions to the history of Science. In this paper we propose, in particular, some analysis that have already given interesting results in the first tests, like those based on the measure of the double ratio and others on the analysis of the difference between the figures surveyed on the ancient monuments and the tests that derive from the advanced theoretical hypothesis.