Giovan Pietro Bellori Research Papers (original) (raw)

This article, which is a fragment of my PhD Dissertation written under the supervision of Professor Corina Popa, examines the way in which illusionism is discussed in the early modern period, thus trying to offer, in its original context, a background for understanding the attitude of Roman art theorists from the seventeenth century towards illusionistic painting.
Illusion is the most feared danger in a century obsessively concerned with the certainty of knowledge; asserting the epistemic capacity of painting – which, in my opinion, was a chief concern for Seicento Roman theorists – meant by necessity in the seventeenth century confronting
this problem. The issue was extremely pressing since topoi about painting as an art of illusion were at the core of Renaissance art theory. More so, illusion, had become, on the one hand, associated with the wondrous, thus un-scientific, attitude towards nature characteristic of the now obsolete culture of curiosity; but, on the other hand, it was on occasions considered a tool for understanding the flaws of the visual process of deriving knowledge from nature, and many natural philosophers were interested in the science of optical illusions.
One of the most salient features of the whole debate is the way perspectival effects are assessed. For Renaissance art theorists and practitioners the employment of perspective offered the guarantee
for a “rational,” implicitly “scientific,” representation. Numerous treatises from the seventeenth century, though, discuss it and the anamorphic representations based on it, as means of tricking the senses and it is no surprise that art theorists of the second half of the seventeenth century do not approve of the illusionism based on mathematical rules (anamorphoses, trompe-l’ oeil). Based on the individual, subjective point of view, such artworks cannot find their approval, since they do not partake to the unbiased decorum of objectivity of the scientific endeavour.
I further highlight the difficulty of endorsing trompe-l’ oeil – a type of image that introduces ambiguity and disrupts the transitive function by putting forward the artifice involved – by an art-theoretical system rooted in the belief in the function of the image to represent (in the
cartesian sense) and to communicate. I also put forward a complementary explanation for the disbelief towards illusionism: the conjunction of illusionistic mimesis and the representation of the
particulars challenges the Classicist notion of the Idea, which must, through judicious selection, transcede the particulars in nature and embrace its very essence, and thus guide every artistic act. Finally, I argue that the suspicion of art theorists towards illusionism owes to its futility for scientific representation, in the view of early modern natural historians, which, in its turn, is based on this very issue of the association between illusionism and particulars.
Focusing on the position of illusion in seventeenth-century thinking, I have showed the main reasons for the changes in the discourse of art theorists (Mancini, Bellori, Passeri, etc.) about painting’ s capacity to create illusion.