ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows how the ‘invention’ of perspective did not take place in isolation – outside the literary/artistic milieu of early Renaissance humanism – but was enmeshed in the linguistic debates of the time concerning relationships between poetry and rhetoric, the volgare and Latin. It explains how the priorities of early humanism, in the forging of relationships between architecture, pictorial space and language, succumbed to the increasing dominance of antiquarianism, and the capacity of recovered archaeological fragments to communicate a mytho-historic renovatio. This aspect of mid-sixteenth-century papal Rome coincided with the first systematic attempts to formulate a chronology of ancient Roman history; the basis of future Roman historiographical studies. The book focuses on how the cultural milieu of the seventeenth century influenced architectural, urban and artistic developments in Papal Rome.
