italian books

[kip_w]

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I was looking at one of the books we picked up in Italy. It's the exhibition catalog for a show at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence on the origin of perspective. The show, which I literally had to run through when I discovered it after my time had already run out, included illusion boxes and fake perspective inlays and all that wonderful stuff. While I looked at it, I was thinking about an artist whose work we had seen in Venice. He carved some terrific wooden panels at the Scuolo di San Rocco. His name had gone out of my head, so I went back to the book at hand and picked a line at random to see if I could make head and/or tails of it, and halfway through the sentence, I ran into the word "pianta."

Hey, that was the name of the artist in Venice! Roberto Pianta. Thank you, Serendipity!
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Comments

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, he met a tragic end at a birthday party, when he was brutally assaulted by a blindfolded child with a club.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Did you see Borromini's illusion corridor at the Palazzo Spada in Rome?

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Ironically, this was after he knocked dyslexics.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

No, didn't get to the Palazzo. I'll look in my books and see if I have any pictures of it. Failing that, I'll Google! There's an illusion box in the National Gallery in London, near the Vermeers. Great stuff -- wonderful world sometimes.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Alas, the corridor's effect is three-dimensional, so you have to walk into it to get the impact.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Many of the ones in Hidden Pictures are like that. They show photos of them from both angles so you can judge the effect, and if possible, they print them so you can lay your eye next to the page and get the effect. The book is one of the best for showing things so you can "get" them, even to the point of including a mirrored mylar sheet you can roll into a cylinder to see "puzzle" pictures. Secret Feature Number 26: There's No Index! That's right, readers of this fine book are untroubled by any sort of bothersome index to spoil their fumbling pleasure.

The same isn't true for my Italian book on the exhibition. Borromini is only mentioned once in there, in the text, sans picture. But at least they have a way to check without looking at every page.

Illusionistic paintings on walls were suggested once in a letter to the editor here, where we have a couple of major bridge-tunnels connecting two major sections of our megalopolis. A reader suggested painting happy Disney characters on the walls, so that the tunnels didn't scare folks. But I thought that might make them drive even slower, so maybe painting monsters would be better. Then I thought, if you really want to scare people, paint water cascading down the walls and puddling on the roadway.

I once walked into a three-dimensional corridor and got the impact.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Around here there's a Friendly Highway Tunnel with a rainbow painted around the edge of the entrance.

It is, not surprisingly, in Marin.