ABSTRACT
Andrea Pozzo's influential treatise, Prospettiva de pittori e architetti offers a sophisticated formulation of the relationship between fictive space and three-dimensional architecture, in which they are presented as equals. Pozzo invokes history in support of his view that experience in painting is invaluable to the architect, remarking that there is little difference between perspective painters and architects, other than that one builds with stones and the other composes with lines and colours. Pozzo's pictorial architecture, although generated by plans, elevations, and sectional drawings, results not in a concrete reality but in an abstract representational system. The pictorial reality is achieved through the manipulation and distortion of geometry, while the architectural illusion depends on the optical translation of these distortions into an image that 'exists' only in the perception of an observer. The success of Pozzo's illusionistic architecture in the Frascati church relies upon a single painted surface – the back wall of the structure – for its effect.
