The crociera room of villa barbaro in maser. Perspective restitution of architectural frescoes

Abstract

The Palladian villa Maser encloses in its interior an important cycle of frescoes painted in 1560 by Paolo Veronese. Conforming to the balance of space and light that characterizes the villa, painted architecture dialogues with real environments for amplifying it in an illusionistic way. This paper aims to analyze the relationship between the large vestibule of the house – the so called Crociera Room – and its frescoed surfaces: in particular, through geometric analysis of two pictorial fields it has been identified the perspective construction used by Veronese to revolutionize the physical space of the room. Although in each examined architectural side it has been registered the overlap of several perspective structures, the many transgressions to rules do not compromise the illusory scene because in the work realized by the painter, the virtual space integrates the real one simulating the existance of an unique space. The results the operations of perspective inversion, conducted in this study, allowed to organically reconstruct the architecture imagined by the artist.