Progettare la terza dimensione. Espedienti prospettici dall'antichità al rinascimento

The more or less obvious intent of wall paintings is to create an illusion by breaking through the image plane. To do this they rearrange architectural structures to create, on the one hand, the painted scene and, on the other, the illusory dilation of real space in the frescoed room. Whoever studies the history of perspective methods and techniques finds that the pictorial creation of an illusory space is much older than they think, sinking its roots in Antiquity: while historically and artistically speaking it may appear heretical to try and compare the wall paintings of the so-called Second Pompeian Style and the Baroque illusory painting, nevertheless the theory of perspective contains several recurrent topics. The latter can no doubt be justified by renewed interest – starting in the fifteenth century - in the scientific as well as poetic texts produced in antiquity and can be classified as “perspective devices” or even “indicators of depth”, in other words tricks to suggest the dilation of real space based on the pictorial composition and the images in the painting. These recurrent elements create a link between the perspective construction and the user of the architectural space; they also facilitate involvement without the need for specific technical knowledge, filling a sort of limbo, the intermediate space between perception and vision used to artistically recreate our visible world as well as the real theory of perspective characterised by a scientific method and the biunivocal nature of the relationship between the object and the image, as required by mathematical perspective. This paper will propose some of these devices as a basis for a catalogue which can, of course, be expanded and enlarged; it will also indicate the literary sources which appear to link the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the early Renaissance by proposing - a thousand years later - pictorial and non-pictorial topics. The paper will highlight similarities and differences between the devices used in ancient wall paintings (Rome, Pompeii, Herculaneum, etc.) and those present in explicitly illusionistic painting from the Renaissance to the imposing decorations of the Baroque. Naturally some albeit key topics will have to be put aside, for example the use of simple geometries and whole number ratios used in fifteenth-century perspective and sixteenth and seventeenth-century perspective construction, as well as in many older works; the paper will focus on aspects which can be easily tackled from a compositional point of view, but which instead closely resemble the logic of perspective.