Stage Three- Application Experiment

Although Bramante’s original intention of bringing sculpture relief into architectural practice was from a usability point of view – to visually overcome insufficient space, Architects in the later Renaissance seemed were inspired by Bramante and started a trend to make the most of accurate illusionary space for enriched architectural realisation and experience. If to say there is one obvious deficient in Bramante’s solution in Santa Maria presso San Satiro, that is the simulated illusion only corresponds to viewers gazing from the north side of the transept. The illusion would be overridden immediately by reality once the viewers move aside from the nave. (Figure 2.b).

That is not to say, the nature of relief perspective being view specific is a limitation, but quite the contrary, designing when and how illusion collapses into the reality, or even avoiding giving away clear sign of perspective intervention so that a smooth transition between illusion and reality becomes the enriched architectural realisation and experience. These initiatives could be seen from architectural practice of built relief perspective in later Renaissance period - in chronological order, Andrea Palladio and Vicenzo Scamozzi’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza (1580-1585)5; Francesco Borromini and Padre Giovanni Maria da Bitonto’s colonnade at Palazzo Spada (1652-1653)6; Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Scala Regia in Vatican City (1663- 1666)7 . Unfortunately, no architecturaltreatise from that time that might have clearly unveiled how the built relief perspective in those masterpieces were designed has survived.

Figure 3. Brunelleschi’s perspectival experiment

5 Massimiliano Ciammaichella, “Temporary Theatres and Andrea Palladio as a Set Designer,” Nexus Network Journal 21, no.2 (2019): 209-225. 6 Lionello Neppi, Palazzo Spada (Roma : Editalia, 1975), 175-188. 7 Tod A.Marder, “Bernini’s Staircase, 1663-1666,” in Bernini's Scala Regia at the Vatican Palace (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1997), 130-164.