ABSTRACT
Before the systematic establishment of geometric laws of perspective formulated at the end of the fifteenth century, painting passed through a stage in which various artifices made it possible to structure space. The relay between architecture and painting opens onto another relay, between illusion and emptiness. This represents a shift in register, more than in subject matter. The one concerns architecture and its image, which people might call the mirror stage of architecture. Leoni Battista Alberti wrote the first modern treatise on painting, Della Pittura. It was published in Latin in 1435, and almost immediately translated and published in Italian. The Italian edition was immensely popular as a studio handbook, ‘read out of existence’, says Spencer, translator of one of the two English editions. A good portion of the literature on perspective is concerned with debating the three possibilities and tracing their consequences.
