Lo spazio inventato. Ricerche e sperimentazioni in Lombardia: spazi, manufatti, scene

Perspective, a milestone of the Renaissance, characterizes the visual culture of the West and plays an important role until the unhinging of the unity of space by the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Its application to the configuration of real space accompanies the development of modern architecture, rooting some contemporary design installations to history. In Milan its application had an experimental approach from the beginning, destined to affect the development of the arts in the following centuries. Bramante marked its evolution in the relationship between the built and represented space that characterizes the perspective choir of ‘Santa Maria presso San Satiro’, conceived as an integration of the real space. This new solution paved the way for the birth of theatrical scenography and the great season of quadrature in interior decoration, where the architectura picta integrates the physical space in which the observer is located. The geometric coherence of the projection makes the fiction different from the real room, experimenting with the application of varied architectural and projective models in the search for useful techniques to speed up the realization. The result was the development of practical artifices to make the spatial illusion more effective, in a completely different way from the theatrical scenography, in which the fiction was obvious. The perspective game spreads to the smaller scales of the architectural furnishings and scenographic apparatuses with creations, which anticipate by a few centuries the research of the Gesamstungwerk that will characterize the dawn of contemporary art. In this way the Bramante’s legacy reflects in the roots that will lead to the flowering of interior design.