![]() The work, which covers all four walls, was done in decorative wood inlay or intarsia. In 1476, Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, commissioned Baccio Pontelli to create a vision of a humanist world in a small library in the ducal palace. ![]() He constructed an architectural illusion of space which appears to be three or four times deeper than it is in actuality, thus satisfying the demands of the style of the times by the use of illusion.Īlong with having a practical function in the early Renaissance, illusions could also visually enhance the ideals of the humanists. He had been commissioned to remodel the church along more modern Renaissance lines. In one case, the architect Donato Bramante, 1444-1516, was faced with the impossibility of providing space behind the choir in the S. Further, illusions of architectural structures served a practical purpose when lack of funds or expertise precluded placing an actual dome in the transcept of a Renaissance church or when plasterwork for a ceiling proved more expensive than a painted illusion of such decorative work. Illusions of columns and loggias and other architectural supports and details were painted on two-dimensional wall surfaces to enlarge existent interior space. In Masacchio’s work, the illusion of a barrel vault ceiling behind the figure of God complements the design of the interior of the space that houses the painting. It was not until Masacchio painted the Trinity, 142728, that architectural illusions appeared within paintings. The earliest examples of the art of illusion occur in the paintings of architectural elements that surround the frescos in Medieval churches. The realization on the part of the viewer that he or she had been fooled, was a disruption and an intrusion of the sense of harmony that was valued in Renaissance art. In so doing, the illusionists undermined the humanistic ideals of the Renaissance. The Renaissance artists were primarily interested in creating compositions that, with the use of perspective, would visually illustrate harmony, proportion, and unity while the illusionists were intent on creating deliberately deceptive glimpses of reality. However, the use that realism was put to marks the major difference between the two types of artists. Both used the rules of perspective and direct observation of nature to render figures and objects on a flat surface as threedimensionally as they could. The artists of illusion shared the concern of the mainstream of Renaissance artists in presenting scenes as realistically as possible. The art of illusion, or trompe l’oeil, as it is more commonly known, presents a scene in order to fool the viewer into mistaking it for reality.
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