(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)

Chapter 3

Quadrature

The joining of truth and illusion in the interior architecture of Andrea Pozzo

Jodi La Coe

In 1693, Andrea Pozzo published the first volume of his treatise, Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum, a pedagogical demonstration of his perspective drawing method and projection techniques employed in creating interior spatial illusions, quadrature.¹ Pozzo, as both theorist and practitioner, realized many of his immersive quadrature designs throughout Italy and Austria, mainly in churches and convents of the Jesuit order to which he also belonged.² Unlike many perspective theorists who merely represented the image of a person within a section through the cone of vision, Pozzo positioned an embodied observer within the constructed illusion, extending interior space through the joining of the real and the fictitious.³

In perspective theory, space was conceived as a homogenous system in which vision was subject to mathematical laws. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Rene Descartes, who is credited with this shift in

spatial understanding, wrote in his Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences:

I took the subject matter of geometry, which I conceived to be a continuous body or a space indefinitely extended in length, breadth, and height or depth, divisible into distinct parts, which may have distinct shapes and sizes and may be moved or transposed in all sorts of ways.$^4$

The coordination of three axes – length, height, and depth – determined Cartesian space, in which depth and height are equivalent mathematical positions without hierarchy and, therefore, homogenous. However, the positioning of an embodied observer within mathematical space allowed Pozzo to re-center man within a system of meaning, both spatial and spiritual. Baroque perspectival illusions sought to recreate the center of the universe within uniform space. It achieved this effect by physically inhabiting the position from which the illusion converged with the physical to produce a transcendental interior experience.

Truth and falsehood

The positivistic quest initiated by the Scientific Revolution sought to reduce all phenomena to a few all-encompassing rational truths based in mathematics. Reason replaced metaphor as an explanation for the phenomena of the physical world. In both the arts and sciences, popular debate concentrated on the distinction between truth and illusion.$^5$ A deception of the senses approached the ethical question of the ability of the intellect to distinguish truth in the physical world.

For Descartes, visual illusions were a sensual obstacle to the pursuit of truth; the separating of the “true” from the “false” occupied the main intellectual problems of the seventeenth century.$^6$ As Alexandre Koyré explained, Descartes’s quest to determine what is true was an effort to judge the world properly.$^7$ Descartes phrased it as follows:

And I always had an extreme desire to learn to distinguish truth from falsehood in order to have a clear insight into my actions and proceed in this life with assurance.8

While Descartes was opposed to illusion in its many forms, perspective treatises by the end of the seventeenth century included the creation of fantastic illusions on a variety of surfaces. For example, in his book, La perspective curieuse, ou magie artificielle des effets merveilleux, de l’optique par la vision directe, Jean François Niceron disclosed his method of creating anamorphic projections. While these images were created on flat or irregular surfaces, they were to be viewed at an angle or on mirrored surfaces of cones, cylinders, and spheres. In the Convent of Trinitá dei Monti in Rome, Emmanuel Maignan, with the assistance of Niceron, produced two anamorphic illusions along the walls of narrow corridors. While one of the paintings was destroyed in an uprising shortly after the French Revolution, the remaining illusion, viewed frontally, is a representation of the landscape of the Straits of Messina in Calabria. When viewed from an angle along the wall, the hidden image of San Francesco di Paola sitting under a tree lifts away from the scene of his homeland. Many anamorphic illusions disguised hidden images with erotic, or even heretical, content.

Deception of the senses

For Descartes, sense perception, and vision in particular, were to be doubted and were, therefore, undermined in his model for rational thought. Although vision was privileged among the senses, Descartes was suspicious of the profound mental exercise necessary to overcome sensory deceptions.9 He wrote of the eye as the passive receptor of light, declaring that the “first opaque structure in the eye receives the figure impressed upon it by the light.”10 Descartes suggested to his readers to place a dissected human eye, or kindred animal eye, in a shutter through which to view the images formed on a piece of paper held to the back of the eye.11 Similar to the images produced by the camera obscura, the retinal image is transposed vertically

through the passive, ocular lens, requiring mental interpretation of the sensory data. Descartes clarified his theory of the transmission of light, stating:

I would have you conceive of light in a “luminous” body as being simply a certain very rapid and lively movement or activity, transmitted to our eyes though air and other transparent bodies, just as the movement or resistance of the bodies a blind man encounters is transmitted to his hand through his stick.12

In The World, also known as his Treatise on Light, Descartes differentiated between the sensation of light and its cause using the analogy of language: the relationship between what is represented to the thing itself.13 As the eye truly becomes the passive receptor, retinal images acquire an objectivity, a truth. In this sense, the passive lens requires the mind to interpret the arrangement of light rays to understand the shape and position of objects within the Cartesian system. Reflections and illusions, however, appear to be the real things because they affect the eye in the same ordered correspondence of light rays.14 Perspective illusions deceive the eye itself through the presentation of light rays that appear to depict a three-dimensional object. Additionally, in La Dioptrique, Descartes concluded that the mind was also capable of producing a type of sensory deception, as in dreams or an ecstatic state. According to Descartes, the mind was susceptible to delusions of all sorts including hallucinations, lunatic cravings, and dreams. In these cases, sensual perception seems so evidently true yet is not real.15 Although he was surrounded by a proliferation of treatises on and examples of perspective illusions, Descartes opposed any art form that sought to confuse the senses, especially anamorphosis. Descartes philosophically objected to the disjunction between the apparent image and its disguised reconstruction.

Descartes employed many analogies of light and vision to describe reason and rational thought. In 1628, he wrote in his Regulae ad directionem

ingenii (Rules for the direction of the mind) that a lack of reason is virtually equal to blindness.

For it is very certain that unregulated inquiries and confused reflections of this kind only confound the natural light and blind our mental powers. Those who so become accustomed to walk in darkness weaken their eyesight so much that afterwards they cannot bear the light of day.$^{16}$

In Descartes’s view, indulging in illusions and deceptions dulled the intellect and impeded the recognition of truth:

I suppose, therefore, that whatever things I see are illusions; I believe that none of the things my lying memory represents to have happened really did so; I have no senses; body, shape, extension, motion, place are chimeras. What then is true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing is certain.$^{17}$

After Descartes, only the mathematically ordered gaze of the geometer could objectively analyze natural phenomena fixed by coordinates within Cartesian space.$^{18}$ Perspective represented the world from a fixed monocular viewpoint at a static moment in time, and as such, drastically simplified visual experience.

Joining truth and fiction

Descartes’s critique of illusion extended to the visible in general. All forms of artifice, including quadrature, were obstacles in the search for objective truth.$^{19}$ In contradiction to his intentions, Descartes’s philosophies led to the reduction of the sensual experience of Nature to a theater of illusions, mathematically determined, according to Dalia Judovitz, “an effect of human artifice.”$^{20}$ Similarly, perspective transformed an embodied understanding of reality into appearance. To paraphrase Vittorio de Feo in

Andrea Pozzo: architettura e illusione, “more than performing mathematical perspective with precision, Pozzo recognized a possibility of reality where perspective translates the virtuality of the real with the help of the imagination.”21 However, it was the incorporation of the viewer in his works that opened the narrative possibilities of perspective illusions.

In the thirtieth figure of the first volume of his treatise, Pozzo wrote, “Optica projectio aedifici IONICI; ubi de modo jugendi fictum cum vero.”22 In the first English translation, John James of Greenwich liberally interpreted this passage as “An IONICK Work in Perspective; with the Manner of reconciling the fictitious to the solid Architecture.” Clearly, the second half of the statement did not follow the original text. One might argue that James chose to depict what Pozzo was proposing, rather than to awaken the debate over truth and sensual deception. The accompanying figure depicts just that sentiment, the dividing line between the solid or three-dimensional building, and his two-dimensional painted surface extending the solid into the fictitious architecture. However, in the sixty-second figure, Pozzo used the phrase “aedificia solida” when he wanted to signify “solid architecture.” Given the centrality of the Roman Jesuit College in contemporary scientific debates, Pozzo would have supported a closer translation of the original Latin phrase as “the manner of joining the fictitious to the real (or true).”

Unlike contemporary artists, Pozzo was not creating perspectival interior views within a frame. He was concerned with the embodied experience of illusion, with a seamless transition between the real and the fictitious, a joining of truth and illusion at a fixed point within Cartesian space. At this single point, marked in the paving pattern with a marble or bronze disk, and in the right light, the illusion appears to be real, the senses are deceived. When one moves away from the given vantage point, the architecture, ornaments, and figures appear to grow distorted. At the end of the first volume of Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum, Pozzo included his response to those who advocated the use of multiple viewpoints within a large perspective illusion attempting to expand the area from which the illusion is effective. Pozzo believed that the distortion of figures that occurs

when viewed from other angles lends itself to illusion by increasing the dramatic effect when properly positioned.

Flesh and stone

Thirteen years prior to the publication of his advocacy of a single point of view, Pozzo created the hallway to the rooms of St. Ignatius in the Casa Professa in Rome, in which he experimented with overlapping perspective illusions combined with frontal presentations of framed images. The result is a combination of painterly effects and a layering of illusionistic techniques. More than in any of his other quadrature, perspective illusions also known in French as trompe l’oeil, or “trick of the eye,” Pozzo played with the joining of truth and illusion in this small, unassuming space. The entry to the hallway is immediately off the landing of a wide stair, suggesting that these spaces are tucked between the main levels of the Jesuit convent. When approaching the room, the entry wall begins the illusion with the appearance of sculptural niches containing life-like statues of Jesuits Aloysius Gonzaga and Stanislaus Kostka surmounted by gray, stone-like putti (small, chubby, often winged, male cherubs) over the cornice. In the stairway, the color palette is subdued in grays, browns, and muted flesh tones joining in the surrounding surfaces of plaster and gray marble. In contrast, the interior of the hallway erupts in color and glittering gold. The two saintly visages in the landing also oppose the numerous, voluptuous, fleshy figures in the hallway.

Upon entering the hallway, a few steps place the viewer above a marble disk, which marks the proper point of view on the floor. From this point, Pozzo corrected the architecture of the space in his illusion. The far wall, which is crudely angled, was painted to appear farther away and perpendicular to the side walls. A pair of angels playing musical instruments are sitting under an archway supported by ornate columns framing the view beyond to a domed space terminated by a simple altar for St. Ignatius. In contrast, the hallway, which is a plain, barrel-vaulted space, appears to have ornate pink marble columns with gold composite capitals supporting

voluptuous brackets, also highlighted in gold, spanning a flat ceiling. The space of the brackets extends the height of the small room. Just as the subdued palette and features of the landing contrast with the Baroque ornament of the hallway, the altar of St. Ignatius and his rooms are undecorated, reflecting the humility of a devoted life.

The space contains four large windows and a recessed doorway in the wall to the right. Opposite the window wall is the door and window into the rooms of St. Ignatius, which are a few steps higher than the level of the hallway. The window is duplicated in the painted illusion in order to carry the symmetry in the arcade along the side wall. The stairs and the door leading to the rooms present the most difficult piece to incorporate into the illusion. Although Pozzo varied the thickness of the marble door frame, the stairs and their railings do not conform to the perspective. Within the ornate gold-leafed beams of the illusionistic ceiling are a variety of figures and framed images. Larger, adult angels are painted as fleshy winged beings carrying framed monochromatic profiles of important Jesuit brothers. All framed images with the illusion are presented undistorted by the forced perspective viewpoint and are, therefore, meant to be viewed frontally. Continuing with the juxtaposition of contrasts, there are two versions of putti, rosy-fleshed babes and gray stone statues. These cherubs are at approximately the same scale, lending to the interplay between flesh and painted stone. Also framed in the ceiling are monochromatic scenes from the life of St. Ignatius in vibrant hues.

The side walls contain seven bays which alternate between four window bays and the three interstices. On the wall opposing the windows, the bays corresponding to each window appear to be deeper than the others, with two adult angels standing below a framed scene from the life of Christ in each. The interstitial bays are less wide, accommodating a longer frame, each containing a miraculous scene from the life of St. Ignatius. Under these frames, fleshy putti are shown with vases of flowers, while above, many fleshy putti with tiny wings occupy spaces within the ornate brackets adjacent to painted stone putti. Some of the fleshy babes look down at the viewer, while others display additional monochromatic profile portraits of important Jesuits.

Figure 3.2 Ceiling of the hallway to the rooms of St. Ignatius depicting fleshy and stone putti Image credit: author

Figure 3.3 Overlapping brackets in the corner of the ceiling of the hallway to the rooms of St. Ignatius Image credit: author

Walking toward the center of the hallway, one experiences an elongation of the architectural interior and figures. These appear to grow, to stretch the farther away one moves from the marble disk. In contrast, the framed images attract the eye away from the distortion as they are viewed frontally.

Turning around completely, one faces the entry wall. Looking in this direction, one can see the stairs to the rooms of St. Ignatius that were previously unnoticed in the periphery. The entry wall is also in perspective illusion when viewed from a point designated by a marble disk in the floor pattern symmetrically opposite the first marble disk. Here, Pozzo employed a second point of view; the perspective illusion is divided at the midpoint of the room. In the corners of the room, the distortions cause the brackets to appear to overlap each other, while in the center of the room the figures are nearly frontal.

In the hallway to the rooms of St. Ignatius, Pozzo invited the viewer to participate in the room, to walk around the space in order to view the layers of the illusion and counter-illusion. This process simultaneously reveals and destroys the illusionistic effect. In keeping with the contemporary debate, Pozzo redefined perspective as a “Counterfeiting of the Truth.” Joining truth with illusion, the layering of illusion and artifice in this hallway reveals his playful manipulation of the visual experience of interior architecture.

Notes

1. Volumes one and two of Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum were originally published by Giovanni Giacomo Komarek in Rome in 1693 and 1700, respectively, and included both Latin and Italian text. Only the first volume was translated and distributed widely. Komarek published two translations of the first volume: Italian/German and Italian/French versions, both in 1700. Another German translation paired with the original Latin text was published in Vienna in 1706 by Jeanne Boxbarth and Conrado Bodenter. A Latin/English version, entitled Perspective for Architecture and Painting, was published by John James of Greenwich (London, 1707). Giuseppe Castiglione published a French/Flemish translation in Brussels, 1708. The Jesuits even translated a copy into Chinese, 1737 (see Marina Carta and Anna Menichella, “Il successo editoriale del Trattato”, in Andrea Pozzo, ed. Vittorio de Feo and Valentino Martinelli [Milan: Electa, 1996], p. 230).

2. From 1676 to 1680, Pozzo travelled to Torino, Milan, and Como completing a number of works. Afterwards, he settled in Rome to paint his celebrated masterpieces from 1681 to 1702.

included the nave, dome, and altar of the Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio, the Cappella della Vigna, the refectory of Trinità dei Monti, and the hallway to the rooms of St. Ignatius in the Casa Professa adjacent to Il Gesù. While in Rome, Pozzo also painted several canvases and illusionistic side chapels, an altar, and a false dome for the Chiesa del Gesù in Frascati. In 1702, Leopold I called Pozzo from Rome to Vienna. As he travelled for two years, Pozzo made many more perspective illusions in churches and palazzi in Florence, Trento, and Montepulciano. In Belluno, he designed the architecture for a Jesuit college. Pozzo spent the final years of his life in Vienna designing illusions in the Universitätskirche, Franziskanerkirche, and the palazzo Lichtenstein. In addition to the college of Belluno, Pozzo witnessed the construction of his architectural designs in Ragusa, Lubiana, Trieste, Montepulciano, and Trento. From his numerous designs for altars, he executed the elaborate altar constructions for both Il Gesù and Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio in Rome (see Vittorio de Feo, Andrea Pozzo: Architettura e illusione [Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1988] and Roberta Maria Dal Mas, “La opere architettoniche a tous peintres, graveurs, sculpteurs …” (Paris: Melchior Tavernier and François L’Anglois dit Chartres, 1642); and Ferdinando Galli-Bibena, L’Architetture civile … (Parma: Paolo Monti, 1711).

For contemporary perspective treatises, see Abraham Bosse, La manière universelle de M. des Argues Lyonnois pour poser l’essieu & placer les heures & autres choses aux cadrans au Soleil (Paris: Petreius, 1643); Jean Dubreuil, La Perspective pratique nécessaire à tous peintres, graveurs, sculpteurs … (Paris: Melchior Tavernier and François L’Anglois dit Chartres, 1642); and Ferdinando Galli-Bibena, L’Architetture civile … (Parma: Paolo Monti, 1711).

Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences original edition, Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences, Leiden, Netherlands: Ian Maire, 1637; translation: Philosophical Writings, trans. Elizabeth Ascombe and Peter Thomas Geach (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1971), p. 34.

Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art From Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

This statement was recorded in Howard Hubbard, Bernini (London: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 19, according to Basil Willey, The Seventeenth-Century Background (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 9ff, passim.

Alexandre Koyré, “Introduction”, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Rene Descartes, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. xxi.

8 Rene Descartes, Philosophical Writings, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 13.

9 Ibid., pp. 244–245.

10 Ibid., p. 241.

11 Dalia Judovitz, “Vision, Representation and Technology in Descartes”, in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), p. 75.

12 Op. cit., p. 71.

13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, trans. James M. Edie (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 170.

14 Descartes, Philosophical Writings, p. 242.

15 Rene Descartes, “Meditations on the First Philosophy Wherein Are Demonstrated the Existence of God and the Distinction of the Soul From Body”, in Philosophical Writings, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach (1642) (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1971), pp. 61–62.

16 Rene Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii (Rules for the direction of the mind) (unpublished manuscript, 1626–1628); translation found in Judovitz, “Vision, Representation and Technology in Descartes” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 67.

17 Descartes, Philosophical Writings, p. 66.

18 Op. cit., p. 178.

19 Dalia Judovitz, “Vision, Representation and Technology in Descartes”, and Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for the Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation”, in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 63 and 53, respectively.

20 Ibid. (Judovitz), p. 65.

21 de Feo, Andrea Pozzo, pp. 14–15.

22 Andrea Pozzo, Perspective in Architecture and Painting: An Unabridged Reprint of the English-Latin Edition of the 1693 “Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum” (a reprinting of the London 1707 edition), trans. John James of Greenwich (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1989), p. 73.

23 Ibid., p. 221.