Across the frame: False architectural framing device in Italian Renaissance frescoes as a place to connect fiction to reality

Loos, Roxanne
(2016) Rahmen – Frames. Funktionbestimmungen in der Vormoderne. Definitions of Function in the Pre-Modern Era — Location: Warburg Haus, Hamburg (29.April.2016)

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Following recent research in the field of Intermediality which studies the interplays between different artistic media, this paper examines how mural painting fits into architecture through feigned architectural frameworks during the High Renaissance in Rome (from the late 1480s to 1520s). Indeed mural decorations in the main center of artistic creation at that time appear to be a privileged place to draw out the growing importance of the frame even before its great development during Mannerist and Baroque periods. Those Renaissance frescoes have already been studied many times. But they were mainly confined to the iconographic and stylistic innovations, at the expense of framing issues, yet determinative for both the meaning conveyed by the picture and its effects on the beholder. This marginal approach (towards traditional history of art) on margins aims therefore to discuss the key role that the frame’s threshold plays as a ‘third place’ to connect the (fictional) space of the picture and the (real) space of the beholder. We will examine more precisely the way those false architectural frames can get over the boundaries in order to invite the viewer into pictorial space with the help of perspective lines. Among several devices, we will study the theatrical model with an arch and a proscenium that stage the picture, such as the Carafa Chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva (Filippino Lippi, c.1488-1493). This example, where a staircase was originally planned instead of the false marble basement, will demonstrate the interlink power of the borders, especially when they are transgressed by some characters stepping out of the scope. In such a reflexive way, we will see that fiction can also get out of his confinement to enter into reality. In light of these observations, this paper finally intends to shed a new light on this body of work by showing how the Renaissance framing issues had partly laid the groundwork for what happened in the Mannerist and Baroque arts, which are usually considered as periods where earliest forms of transgression of picture’s limits appear to set up the Early Modern period.
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Loos, R. (2016). Across the frame: False architectural framing device in Italian Renaissance frescoes as a place to connect fiction to reality. Rahmen – Frames. Funktionbestimmungen in der Vormoderne. Definitions of Function in the Pre-Modern Era, Warburg Haus, Hamburg. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/179365