Crossing the square, the columns will seem to approach and move away, creating movement and a series of full and empty spaces. In designing the colonnade, Gian Lorenzo Bernini played with optical games, with a spectacular result. It took eleven years of work (1656-1667), with more than 40 thousand cubic meters of travertine transported from Tivoli by land or pulled by horses along the banks of the river: with its colonnaded arcades, this famous square symbolizes the Church’s universal embrace towards believers but also towards “heretics and agnostics to enlighten them with the true faith”. To increase the illusion, on the back wall there’s a statuette that becomes the vanishing point of the whole architecture: it seems life-size but in reality it is less than a meter high. By using perspective devices – for example, the downward ceiling, the slightly uphill floor, the converging walls and the side columns that gradually get smaller – the colonnade seems in fact more than 30 meters long although measuring less than nine. Realized between 16 by Francesco Borromini for Cardinal Bernardino Spada, who was fond of perspective games and illusions, it is an incredible work that plays with the view of the spectators, but also a refined warning against the illusory nature of earthly life. With its swirling vitality, its frenetic rhythm, its scenographic illusionism, the work conveys a feeling of vertigo: the painting seems to overflow from the fake marble cornice dividing the vault into five compartments and makes the fresco the manifesto of the new Baroque style. The Triumph of Divine Providence celebrates the power of the Barberini family – whose bees on the coat of arms appear in the center of the ceiling – through a myriad of characters, set in a space dilated to infinity beyond the limits imposed by the architecture. #1 Palazzo Barberini, The Triumph of Divine ProvidenceĪn imposing work in an amazing place: in 1639 Pietro da Cortona frescoed the vault of the main hall of Palazzo Barberini with a masterpiece of optical illusion. Here you will find seven extraordinary Roman optical illusions, to make you discover how beautiful it can sometimes be to be deceived. “Ingenuity and design constitute the Magic Art by whose means you deceive the eye and make your audience gaze in wonder”: so wrote Gian Lorenzo Bernini, one of the great masters of the baroque movement, whose aesthetics focused on theatricality and illusionism. The wonder of art or the art of wonder? From trompe-l’œil paintings that magically make three-dimensional objects appear on a surface, to images that appear in their true shape when viewed in some “unconventional” way, fake architectures and illusionist perspective, there are many examples of how to play with space, amplifying its dimensions or modifying its perception, and creating compositions able to enchant and excite.
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