The Apse Scenes in the Prospective Inventions of Andrea Pozzo

Abstract

It was the great multi-talented artists such as Bernini, and Giovan Battista Aleotti, Bernardo Buontalenti and Giacomo Torelli before him, using a toolkit that included a vast array of figurative languages as well as the mechanical and optical sciences, who wove the threads of an extraordinary network of evocations and borrowed devices that were distilled from the immense cauldron of literature, arts and theatre of the Baroque period. For all these artists, works in architecture and in theatre constituted crucial experiences in the profession, the laboratories for comparing artistic forms of expression and scientific practices. At the end of the seventeenth century, a significant role was played by Andrea Pozzo (Trento 1642 — Vienna 1709). A simple Jesuit brother, he occupied an important place, gathering to himself the entire legacy of his predecessors, although employing it almost exclusively in a religious context ([2]; [7]; [9]). His magnificently illustrated treatise, Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum, published in Rome in two volumes by the typographer Komarek between 1693 and 1700, is the most evocative and efficacious document possible of praxis and mastery; here Pozzo presents the sum of his experiences as a painter, architect, decorator and scene designer, all united in the service of that perspectiva artificialis which over the course of the 1600s had benefitted from the contributions of so many scientists and artists.