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

Author: Jodi La Coe Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 3 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/la-coe-2018-quadrature.md

Summary

La Coe reads Andrea Pozzo's quadrature — the Baroque perspectival illusion that extends real interior architecture into painted fiction — as an early and exemplary case of interior architecture, produced by "the joining of truth and illusion." Against the seventeenth-century philosophical background in which Descartes made deception of the senses the central obstacle to truth (the passive eye, the doubted vision, the opposition to anamorphosis and all sensory confusion), Pozzo did the opposite: he positioned an embodied observer inside the constructed illusion, joining the fictitious to the real at a fixed vantage point within Cartesian space — marked in the floor by a marble disk — and thereby "re-center[ed] man within a system of meaning, both spatial and spiritual." The chapter's second half is a close reading of Pozzo's hallway to the rooms of St. Ignatius in the Casa Professa, Rome, where overlapping illusions, frontal framed images, fleshy and painted-stone putti, and a second vantage point at the room's midpoint make the viewer's movement simultaneously reveal and destroy the illusion — Pozzo's "playful manipulation of the visual experience of interior architecture."

Key Claims

Pozzo published the first volume of Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum in 1693 (vol. 2, 1700) as a pedagogical demonstration of his perspective method and the projection techniques used to create interior spatial illusions — quadrature; he was both theorist and practitioner, realizing immersive quadrature mainly in Jesuit churches and convents in Italy and Austria (Sant'Ignazio's nave, dome and altar; Trinità dei Monti's refectory; the Casa Professa hallway; the false dome at Frascati; the Universitätskirche and Franziskanerkirche in Vienna). The treatise was translated into German, French, English (John James of Greenwich, 1707), Flemish, and even Chinese (1737).
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."
Perspective theory conceived space as a homogeneous system subject to mathematical laws — the Cartesian coordination of three equivalent axes (length, breadth, height/depth), in which "depth and height are equivalent mathematical positions without hierarchy and, therefore, homogenous." Pozzo's positioning of an embodied observer within this mathematical space "allowed [him] 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," achieving this "by physically inhabiting the position from which the illusion converged with the physical to produce a transcendental interior experience."
The Scientific Revolution's positivistic quest sought to reduce phenomena to all-encompassing rational truths based in mathematics; "Reason replaced metaphor as an explanation for the phenomena of the physical world," and debate in both arts and sciences concentrated on the distinction between truth and illusion — the deception of the senses "approached the ethical question of the ability of the intellect to distinguish truth in the physical world."
For Descartes, sense perception — and vision in particular — was to be doubted and was therefore undermined in his model for rational thought: the eye is a passive receptor of light (the retinal image "requiring mental interpretation of the sensory data," camera-obscura-like), and light itself is only "a certain very rapid and lively movement or activity, transmitted to our eyes" (the blind man's stick analogy).
Because reflections and illusions "affect the eye in the same ordered correspondence of light rays" as real things, perspective illusions deceive the eye itself; in La Dioptrique Descartes added that the mind can also produce sensory deceptions (dreams, ecstatic states, hallucinations) — sensual perception can "seem so evidently true yet [be] not real."
Descartes opposed any art form that sought to confuse the senses, especially anamorphosis: he "philosophically objected to the disjunction between the apparent image and its disguised reconstruction." He used light and vision analogies for reason itself — lack of reason is "virtually equal to blindness" (Regulae, 1628).
After Descartes, "only the mathematically ordered gaze of the geometer could objectively analyze natural phenomena fixed by coordinates within Cartesian space"; perspective represented the world from a fixed monocular viewpoint at a static moment in time, "drastically simplif[ying] visual experience."
The paradox (via Dalia Judovitz): in contradiction to his intentions, Descartes's philosophies reduced the sensual experience of Nature to "a theater of illusions, mathematically determined — 'an effect of human artifice.'"
A translation crux anchors the chapter's argument: Pozzo's figure 30 reads "Optica projectio aedifici IONICI; ubi de modo jugendi fictum cum vero" — but John James of Greenwich's 1707 English translation rendered it "with the Manner of reconciling the fictitious to the solid Architecture," while Pozzo used "aedificia solida" when he meant "solid architecture" (fig. 62). Given the Roman Jesuit College's centrality in contemporary scientific debates, the closer rendering is "the manner of joining the fictitious to the real (or true)": Pozzo's project is about truth and illusion, not mere reconciliation with solid construction.
Unlike contemporary artists creating framed perspectival interior views, Pozzo 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" — marked in the paving with a marble or bronze disk; from it, "in the right light, the illusion appears to be real, the senses are deceived"; away from it, architecture, ornaments and figures "appear to grow distorted."
Pozzo advocated a single point of view against those advocating multiple viewpoints to widen an illusion's effective zone, believing that distortion from other angles "lends itself to illusion by increasing the dramatic effect when properly positioned."
Thirteen years before publishing that advocacy, Pozzo built the hallway to the rooms of St. Ignatius (Casa Professa, Rome, adjacent to Il Gesù) as an experiment in overlapping perspective illusions combined with frontal presentations of framed images — "a combination of painterly effects and a layering of illusionistic techniques"; more than in any of his other quadrature (a.k.a. trompe l'oeil, "trick of the eye"), here Pozzo played with the joining of truth and illusion.
The hallway's details stage the real/fictitious junction: the crudely angled far wall painted to appear farther and perpendicular; the plain barrel vault "corrected" into pink marble columns with gold composite capitals; the real window duplicated in paint to carry the arcade's symmetry; the stairs and railings — "the most difficult piece to incorporate into the illusion" — left non-conforming, with Pozzo varying the thickness of the marble door frame instead.
All framed images within the illusion (monochromatic profiles of Jesuits, scenes from the life of St. Ignatius and of Christ) are presented undistorted by the forced perspective viewpoint — "meant to be viewed frontally"; two versions of putti, rosy-fleshed babes and gray stone statues, at approximately the same scale, create "the interplay between flesh and painted stone."
The viewer's participation is the work's engine: walking toward the room's center elongates the interior and its figures, while the framed images attract the eye away from distortion; turning around reveals a second marble disk and point of view, the illusion "divided at the midpoint of the room," brackets overlapping in the corners, figures nearly frontal at the center.
"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 truth/illusion debate, Pozzo redefined perspective as a "Counterfeiting of the Truth" — the layering of illusion and artifice revealing "his playful manipulation of the visual experience of interior architecture."

Connections

Concepts: quadrature · perspective · anamorphosis · interior-architecture · interiority · representation · perception · embodiment · space · enlightenment · phenomenal-transparency · optic-haptic-perception Authors: Jodi La Coe · Gregory Marinic (ed.) · Maurice Merleau-Ponty (cited on Descartes's theory of sensation) Debates: Truth and Illusion — the chapter's founding problematic: Descartes's opposition to illusion vs. Pozzo's joining of truth and illusion · interior-design-vs-architecture — the chapter title retrospectively names Pozzo's work "interior architecture," the anachronism Hollis diagnosed Related source notes: McClure & McClure — Inside Looking In: The Prospect of the Aspect — the experiential twin of Pozzo's centering: the Pantheon's oculus "plac[es] the human at the center of the universe, and… the intersection of a universal x, y, and z axis" — the Cartesian crossing inhabited architecturally rather than painted · Hollis — (Re)constructing Histories — the sibling chapter: Hollis's anachronism problem (Michelangelo as "interior architect") meets La Coe's retroactive naming of Pozzo as interior architect · Deyong — A history of style and the modern interior — the perspectival construction that "reduces time to a static moment" (Deyong) is the very system Pozzo inhabits and dramatizes · Taylor & Preston — Proximities — the embodied, culturally lived organism of the interior meets Pozzo's embodied observer at the marble disk · Merleau-Ponty — Phenomenology of Perception — the phenomenology of embodied perception that "re-centers" what Cartesian optics passive-ized

Direct Quotes

The chapter carries no page numbers in the wiki's OCR copy; La Coe's own prose is located by section heading. Passages quoted from other authors carry the note numbers of La Coe's endnotes.

"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." (opening)

"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." (opening)

"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." (opening)

"A deception of the senses approached the ethical question of the ability of the intellect to distinguish truth in the physical world." (§ "Truth and falsehood")

"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." (Descartes, Discourse on Method, n. 8)

"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." (§ "Deception of the senses")

"Reflections and illusions, however, appear to be the real things because they affect the eye in the same ordered correspondence of light rays." (§ "Deception of the senses")

"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." (Descartes, Philosophical Writings, p. 66, n. 17)

"Perspective represented the world from a fixed monocular viewpoint at a static moment in time, and as such, drastically simplified visual experience." (§ "Deception of the senses")

"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.'" (§ "Joining truth and fiction")

"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." (La Coe paraphrasing Vittorio de Feo, Andrea Pozzo: architettura e illusione, § "Joining truth and fiction")

"However, it was the incorporation of the viewer in his works that opened the narrative possibilities of perspective illusions." (§ "Joining truth and fiction")

"An IONICK Work in Perspective; with the Manner of reconciling the fictitious to the solid Architecture." (James of Greenwich's 1707 rendering of Pozzo's "Optica projectio aedifici IONICI; ubi de modo jugendi fictum cum vero," § "Joining truth and fiction")

"One might argue that James chose to depict what Pozzo was proposing, rather than to awaken the debate over truth and sensual deception." (§ "Joining truth and fiction")

"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." (§ "Joining truth and fiction")

"When one moves away from the given vantage point, the architecture, ornaments, and figures appear to grow distorted." (§ "Joining truth and fiction")

"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." (§ "Joining truth and fiction")

"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." (§ "Flesh and stone")

"All framed images with the illusion are presented undistorted by the forced perspective viewpoint and are, therefore, meant to be viewed frontally." (§ "Flesh and stone")

"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." (§ "Flesh and stone")

"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." (closing)

Open Questions

La Coe names Pozzo's quadrature "interior architecture" — a retroactive application of a late-twentieth-century discipline to 1680s Rome. Is this the productive anachronism Hollis licenses (practices "that reach back well beyond the birth of 'interior architecture' as it is currently conceived"), or should the chapter's claim be historicized as quadratura rather than the discipline?
If the joining of truth and illusion requires a single fixed point (the marble disk) that "simultaneously reveals and destroys" the illusion when traversed, is quadrature an embodied critique of Cartesian vision — or its most complete theatrical realization?
Does Pozzo's "Counterfeiting of the Truth" anticipate the modern problem of the spectacle — a built environment organized around images the viewer knows to be false yet inhabits — or does the anchored vantage point keep it on the side of truth?
The chapter treats vision as Descartes's suspect sense; how does the episode relate to the wiki's optic/haptic problem (optic-haptic-perception) — is Pozzo's embodied observer already a haptic subject, or a monocular geometer's subject dramatized?
Can La Coe's translation argument ("joining the fictitious to the real") be squared with James's "reconciling… to the solid Architecture" — and which translation does the discipline of interior architecture need?