The Medieval framework of religion bound together all the phenomena of the world like a giant puzzle: all the pieces fit together to create a coherent picture. That framework became worm-eaten due to the waves of plague in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, and the consequent feeling that God’s mercy had been withdrawn from humanity; the avarice and worldliness of the Church and the rise of the merchant class in competition with the Church’s power and authority added to the general malaise. When a new framework was formulated by the Humanists in the Renaissance, nature and history became the new pieces of the puzzle that could be assembled to create once again a harmonious and unified world picture.
Perspective in the Renaissance was the framework in which to visually present nature and history. Each picture was a proof that the formula of lines converging to a centric point gave a true picture of the optical experience of nature. Thus paintings became an affirmation of the truth of human experience and perception.
But what happens in perceiving a trompe l'oeil painting? In the moment of recognition, when we see what we took for reality is in fact an illusion, the fabric of the presentation is torn open and once again we are looking “as through a glass darkly.” It is as though the Middle Ages has suddenly reared up and we are given proof that life is an illusion and that we can’t trust our senses to gain true knowledge. These trompe l'oeil magic tricks of illusion act as mirrors we hold to laugh at ourselves for being fooled, and they reveal a certain amount of disquietude on the part of those who paint them and those who in the Renaissance commissioned their construction.
The act of creating is selfconscious. Renaissance man was creating the world according to his understanding of the experience of life. In the Renaissance, the metaphor of the ‘play’ is frequently used in this new venture. “All the worlds’ a stage and all the men and women merely players” (Shakespeare, As You Like It). Erasmus in the Praise of Folly says “. . .to destroy illusion is to ruin the whole play—what else is the whole of life but a sort of play?” Today such ideas express cynicism, but when they were written they denoted a mixture of expressions: the loss of the old framework that governed life, the unease and selfconsciousness that is part of any, new venture, and the excitement of the new world opening out to them, dressed not as it was in the Middle Ages but in whole new cloth.
(figure available in print form)
St. Francis and Scenes from his Life. 2nd half of the XIII century. S. Francesco, Pisa.
The Holy Trinity: Mesaccio, 1427 Santa Maria Novella, Florence.
(figure available in print form)
Piero della Francesca. Flagellation of Christ c. 1460, Palazzo Ducal, Urbino.
(figure available in print form)
Baccio Pontelli
Intersia paneling
Federigo de Montefeltro, 1476, Palazzo Ducel, Urbino
(figure available in print form)
(figure available in print form)
Andrea Mantegna
Ceiling Fresco 1473,
Camera degli Sposi,
Palazzo Ducal, Mantua
Donato Bramante
False Choir, 1483-86
S. Maria presso S. Satiro,
Milan
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Andrea Pozzo
Corridor leading to apartments
of S. Ignatius begun 1682.
Case Professa, Il, Gesu, Rome
(figure available in print form)