page_title: Italian Baroque interior design
section_title: Quadratura
hierarchical_section_title: Italian Baroque interior design / Different sorts of furnishings / Quadratura
context_page_description: Italian Baroque interior design refers to high-style furnishing and interior decorating carried out in Italy during the Baroque period, which lasted from the early 17th to the mid-18th century. In provincial areas, Baroque forms such as the clothes-press or armadio continued to be made into the 19th century.
context_section_description: Quadratura, a term which was introduced in the 17th century and is also normally used in English, became popular with Baroque artists. Although it can also refer to the "opening up" of walls through architectural illusion, the term is most-commonly associated with Italian ceiling painting. Unlike other trompe-l'oeil techniques or precedent di sotto in sù ceiling decorations, which often rely on intuitive artistic approaches to deception, quadratura is directly tied to 17th-century theories of perspective and the representation of architectural space. Due to its reliance on perspective theory, it more fully unites architecture, painting and sculpture and gives a more overwhelming impression of illusionism than earlier examples.
  The artist would paint a feigned architecture in perspective on a flat or barrel-vaulted ceiling in such a way that it seems to continue the existing architecture. The perspective of this illusion is centered towards one focal point. The steep foreshortening of the figures, the painted walls and pillars, creates an illusion of deep recession, heavenly sphere or even an open sky. Paintings on ceilings could, for example, simulate statues in niches or openings revealing the sky.
  Quadratura may also employ other illusionistic painting techniques, such as anamorphosis.
  Examples of illusionistic painting include:
  Andrea Pozzo at San Ignazio in Rome and the Jesuit church in Vienna. He wrote the standard theoretical work of his artistic ideas in the two volumes of : Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum Andreae Putei a societate Jesu (Rome, 1693–1700).
  Pietro da Cortona at the Palazzo Barberini,
  Gianbattista Tiepolo in the Ca' Rezzonico in Venice, Villa Pisani at Stra, and the throne room at the Royal Palace of Madrid.
  Other examples were by Paolo Veronese at Villa Rotonda in Vicenza and Baldassare Peruzzi in the Villa Farnesina of Rome.
caption: The illustionistic perspective of Andrea Pozzo's trompe-l'oeil dome at Sant'Ignazio (1685) creates an illusion of an actual architectural space on what is, in actuality, a slightly concave painted surface.
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