Perspectival Unrealism

Name any cliché about architecture and perspective, and the drawings by the Bibiena family on view at the Morgan Library & Museum promise to explode it. Perspective often is said to be the drawing of realism; here it is the drawing of fantasy. Perspective is for a final rendering; here it is a designer’s working drawing. Perspective, art historian Yve-Alain Bois once wrote, “petrifies the viewer” like the glare of Medusa, by implying an immobile point of view. Yet the Bibiena drawings animate their spaces as if through parallax, with layers of depth poised to spring into motion. Mostly ink-and-wash illustrations of stage designs, the drawings at the Morgan are a rare pleasure to see in person. For those familiar with the Bibienas’ work through published engravings, the originals offer a richness of light and depth that few engravings capture. But be sure to linger long enough in the tiny, windowless Clare Eddy Thaw Gallery for the drawings to slip free of your expectations. I left suspecting these delicate works on paper might be more modern, more surprising, and perhaps even more relevant than I had first imagined.

The Bibienas were eighteenth-century Europe’s most innovative and prolific theatrical designers. Originally from Tuscany, three generations of the family advanced a quiet revolution in the techniques of both perspective drawing and scenography practiced across the continent, and they established a house style that lends striking coherence to their collective oeuvre. Today they are better known in histories of scenic design than in histories of architecture—it is telling that this selection of drawings is a gift to the Morgan from the collection of theatrical lighting designer Jules Fisher. Yet the Bibienas’ publications expounded broadly on “civil architecture,” and their compositional techniques strongly influenced better-remembered paper architects like Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Their signature invention was the design of scenery using two-point, rather than one-point, perspective. Known as the scena per angolo, the technique involved a scenographic trick balanced improbably between trompe l’oeil painting and architecture, one that necessitated a paradoxical treatment of space in linear perspective.

Renaissance perspective generally followed the one-point construction formalized by Leon Battista Alberti, the kind of perspective later theorized by art historians from Erwin Panofsky to Hubert Damisch. It favored certain kinds of space-making. Raphael’s School of Athens is a typical composition, where depth extends backward to the painting’s center, tunneling in barrel vaults toward the vanishing point. Vaults alternate with expansive openings of indeterminate breadth and height, marked by brightly lit walls oriented frontally to the viewer.

Similar compositional conventions served as the basis for theater scenography before the Bibienas. The proscenium offered a frame, and depth was indicated by a series of flat frontal panels with openings that receded to a central vanishing point. The Bibienas were masters, too, of one-point perspective, and several drawings in the exhibition demonstrate their virtuosity in implying a light-filled expanse beyond the limits of the proscenium. Such strategies are especially clear in a small unattributed sketch, Palace Interior with a Barrel Vault (c. 1700). Much as in The School of Athens, a low arch frames the set and masks the top of an arch behind it, suggesting that the intervening space extends far higher than the audience can see.

The scena per angolo accepted the basic premises of one-point scenography but broke free of the correspondence between painted surface and architectural surface. Almost every drawing in the exhibition can be dissected into a series of layers. These visual layers would become flat panels, or “flats,” in the construction of a stage set. Often the layer closest to the audience is in shadow while those behind are bathed in light, intensifying one’s sense of depth. In one-point perspective, each layer is a wall with trompe l’oeil relief, much like texture mapping on a low-res 3D model. In the scena per angolo, layers are no longer flat in the design’s perspectival space; each “flat” collapses considerable depth and spatial complexity into an illusionistic image. In the drawing Palace Courtyard with Columns and Statues (follower of Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, 1720), the first layer behind the proscenium forms a dramatic corner, with successive layers suggesting an intersecting grid of columns, entablatures, and walls extending in all directions. Layering is compositional rather than spatial, yet it secures the possibility of delaminating the drawing into literal layers on stage.

Piranesi took up the Bibienas’ spatial explorations in order to render truly impossible spaces—spaces to be conceived and consumed as paper architecture. Yet for the Bibienas, the drawing remained instrumental for the construction of scenography. Drawing facilitated the creation of spatial effects that no longer followed directly from the actual space of the stage. In their designs, architecture is neither purely image nor purely space, but rather something tenuous that falls in between. This is what is so intriguing, so fresh, about their drawings. In a professional landscape pulled between the dubious realism of performance metrics and the blasé detachment of graphic image-making, the Bibienas’ visions offer a provocative combination of performance and image, one that accepts the impossibility of uniting form and effect.

Then as now, such a truce between reality and illusion offered no easy satisfaction. Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, the family patriarch, once remarked that the “constraints” of set production “much diminish the idea” first envisioned in a rough drawing. Viewing these drawings today, a designer might recognize a familiar struggle to craft an image realizable within existing conventions and technologies—even as the drawing’s ambitions stubbornly exceed the limits of its realization.