Andrea Pozzo, Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum [Perspective of Painters and Architects]

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Andrea Pozzo
Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum – [Perspective of Painters and Architects]

Facsimile reprint of Volume I (1693) and II (1700)
With a separate brochure entitled
Between Illusion and Science: Art according to Andrea Pozzo
Edited by Alessandro Franceschini, Luciana Giacomelli, Mauro Hausbergher, Armando Tomasi

Trento, Autonomous Province of Trento, 2009

Andrea Pozzo, Frescoes of the Church of San Francesco Saverio, Mondovì (Cuneo), 1676-1677
Source: http://www.andreapozzo.com/luoghi/mondovi.html

We have already had occasion to review the Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum by the Jesuit father Andrea Pozzo. We did it with reference to the reprint of the first volume, edited by Maria Walcher Casotti in 2003.

Andrea Pozzo, The False Dome of the Church of Sant'Ignazio in Rome, 1685
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Andrea Pozzo, The Triumph of Sant'Ignazio (1691-1694), Rome, Church of Sant'Ignazio
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Obviously, we are referring to what we wrote in that book review, in particular with regard to the publishing history of the work, which experienced an abrupt success, with immediate translation into many languages. This success was however followed by extremely negative assessments against the treatise when tastes changed and the Baroque style fell out of favour for at least a couple of centuries. The Perspectiva pictorum ended up on the back burner and, if it was quoted, it was for different reasons than the original ones. In 1782-83, now in full neoclassical age, Baldassarre Orsini published the final pages of the second volume in his Antologia dell’arte pittorica (Anthology of pictorial art), dedicated to the art of fresco painting. And in 1845 Mary Philadelphia Merrifield (most likely via Mr Orsini, whose works – including the translation of the De Architectura by Vitruvius – she mentioned), offered the same pages translated into English within her The Art of Fresco Painting (remember that the first English edition of the first volume of Pozzo was in 1707, but that the second volume had never been translated in English).

This facsimile reprint, funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento in 2009, on the occasion of the third centenary of the artist's death, has the great merit to propose the work in its entirety. Let summarize its history briefly: the two volumes were published in Rome respectively in 1693 and in 1700, both by the Bohemian printer Giacomo Komarek [1]. They were intended for a wide distribution, since they were both bilingual, in Latin and Italian. So, there are two title pages. In the first one the author mentions the Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum and in the second the Prospettiva de pittori e architetti.

Andrea Pozzo, False Dome in the Church of  Jesus in Frascati (Rome), 1699-1700
Source: http://www.andreapozzo.com/luoghi/frascati.html

The strongest asset of the work is its visual immediacy. As a general rule, the work is on double page; in the left one, spread over two columns, are the texts in Latin and Italian; in the right one, however, are illustrations. Even today, in school books, the double-page rule is a common practice and is virtually synonymous with easy readability by the user. The didactic purpose of the Perspective is evident. It combines a clear self-promotional intent. This is testified by the dedications, addressed respectively to Emperor Leopold I of Habsburg (the first volume) and Archduke Joseph, son of Leopold and also a future Emperor (second volume). Also the the iconographic apparatus, largely tailored to the achievements of Pozzo in Rome, especially in the Church of St. Ignatius, is to be explained with self-promotion purposes. That of Pozzo, then, was a work that stood in the middle between a manual and a repertoire of his own works.

Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, who has written an introductory essay published in the brochure attached to this facsimile, noted that already in the first drawings Pozzo had eliminated the so-called "construction lines", making on the one hand the visual result of the perspective construction more pleasant, but on the other hand also making less clear how it was obtained. This suggests that the final public in Pozzo’s mind was the one of the kings and nobles of half Europe. Among them, the need to decorate palaces and buildings with large representations amazing visitors had spread quickly. From this point of view, the Perspectiva pictorum walks the same way as (or in fact, it opens the way to) other works such as the Project (Entwurff) of an architectural history by the Austrian Johan Bernhard Fischer von Erlach ( 1712), despite all differences between their works. It is no coincidence that Pozzo had moved to Austria in the early years of the eighteenth century, where he made his skills broadly known until his death, which occurred in 1709.

Andrea Pozzo, False Dome in the Badia of SS. Flora e Lucilla, 1701-1702, Arezzo
Arezzo: Wikimedia Commons

One of the great merits of this reprint is finally to relate among each other the two volumes, published by Pozzo with a seven year time difference. As a result it becomes clear - like Dubourg Glatigny says in his introduction - that, albeit with different characteristics, the two volumes do not represent the development of different and mutually complementary topics, to form an integral project, but in fact are different versions of the same dissertation. They constitute, in fact, two different stages of maturation of the same subject. "The topics addressed and developed in the first volume are basically three: the perspective of paintings, the construction of theatre scenes and finally the production of ceiling painting, elsewhere called quadraturism" (p. 16). The same applies to the second volume. At the basis of everything is the belief that the "painting of architectures" was an indispensable element for the practice of the building, and then for the design of the buildings. Perspective was no longer (or not only) a way of representing, but an integral part of the construction science. That's why Pozzo spoke of a "Perspective of painters and architects."

Andrea Pozzo, False Dome in the Jesuit Dome (or University Church) in Vienna, 1703
Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the first volume of the treatise, Pozzo starts right from the perspective space representation (scenographia), based on the classical Vitruvian breakdown and then placing it in relation to the plant (iconographia) and the elevation (orthographia). The manner in which a floor is transformed into perspective and the addition of the third dimension with the foreshortening of the elevation was based on a method which necessarily required the fixing of a "vanishing point". In the second volume point, instead, the proposed method was different and to some extent easier, since it provided the possibility to operate without a "vanishing point." The practical advantage is that the latter method can be used with less (and often very little) use of notions of geometry by those who uses the method; and can be used, by simply realizing two preparatory drawings on different sheets. As this may seem of little importance, we are faced with a crucial simplification. Until then, in fact, the prospective methods required that drawings were made on a single sheet, necessitating a transposition from one to another by means of parallel lines. This implied that the drawings were to be smaller and less comfortable to use in the design phase.

Andrea Pozzo, The Triumph of Hercules,
Ceiling fresco in the Hall of the Liechtenstein Summer Palace in Vienna, 1704-1708
http://www.liechtensteincollections.at/

In essence, the second volume reflects a state of maturity in which the artist tries to make perspective representation the most basic possible, and then includes it in the representation of sets and in that of figures seen from below up (i.e. the painted ceilings). To top it all is the exemplification of the method by presenting their works, an aspect clearly linked, as mentioned before, to the purpose of self-promotion. The insertion at the end of the second volume, dedicated to summary illustration pages of fresco painting responds to the need of ​​providing the reader with a "complete" product. If perspective was part of the science of construction and covers both painters and architects, it is evident that also the fresco technique, needed for decorating vaults and false domes, belonged to the same science. The treatise includes brief operational advices but also a (particularly pleasing to posterity) list of colours to be used on wall paintings, because they interact well with lime.

All this contributes once again to explain the success of Pozzo’s treatise, but also at the same time to understand why, when the work was re-edited and translated into foreign languages, only one single version (setting aside the other) was used. If anything, the question that one can raise is why the first, and not the second part (i.e. the easier one), was translated. But here the simplest explanatory factor was that distribution of the first volume started before, seven years before the second one.

NOTES

[1] In the introduction to the reprint, the editor, Ms Maria Walcher Casotti, suggests that there were two editions of the first volume, one in 1693 and one in 1694, since there are no specimens without an afterword added after the completion of the vault of the church of St. Ignatius. Here we are replicating, however, that there was clearly only one typesetting, and that most likely the afterword was added in the unsold copies in 1694.