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LUCIA NUTI
Perspective
and map-making. Topography, urban views and instruments
The paper is focused
on the relationship between chorografic representations and instruments,
starting form the first modern town view, Florence " with the chain".
Generally speaking, the use of technical devices to control the metrical
consistency of painted space was fully accepted and valued in Northern
Europe. On the contrary the assumption that the eye is the only arbiter
of the picture was widespread and long-lived in Italian culture. Italian
painters like Michelangelo or Vasari usually dismissed mechanical aids
because they were thought to interfere with the mental creative process.
The same Vasari, however, is proud of explaining how the compass helped
him in drawing a topographical view of Florence.
The value for a total picture, which incorporates the abstract exactness
of measurement and overcomes the limitation of the single pictorial
language, was a widely recognized feeling among scholars and echoed
in many sixteenth century records.
Of course, the terms of this relationship between eye and instrument
are changeable and in each case the elements of the game -drawing from
life, measuring by instruments, choosing the type of instrument, taking
advantage of topographical features, correcting by eye- play a different
quantitative and qualitative role. So every view is a world of its own
and its system does not automatically applies to all cases. Apart from
a few exceptional cases in which the author himself, like Vasari, explains
his methods, we have to find tracks of the process of construction inside
the picture itself.
In the late fifteenth and in the early sixteenth centuries the kind
of surveying instruments that were in use brought about the method of
a central reference point.
A transit dial with magnetic compass is responsible for plans like Imola,
Portsmouth, but is also at the basis of a much more complex image, even
if much more difficult to be discovered, as the representation of Venice,
attributed to Jacopo de' Barbari.
A new season for town views started over about the middle of the sixteenth
century, when surveying instruments had improved and new methods were
developed.
A wide literature flourished on the subject of practical mathematics,
such as calculating the positions of distant and inaccessible points.
The authors of the booklets present their own instruments, outlining
the very great ease and advantage for architects or painters in using
them, when they want to depict a building or a town, and not only in
plan, but in elevation.
A rich imagery celebrated the instruments used, sometimes beside the
portrait of the author, to account for and enhance the techniques and
the specialized mathematical skill required to produce pictorial illusions.
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