Relief in Perspective: Medieval Italian Sculpture and the Rise of Optical Aesthetics

My dissertation defines one of the latent origins of Renaissance painterly perspective in relations established between architectonic space, sculpture, and observers in the later Middle Ages. In particular, architectural relief structures both virtual and social space through proportional relations generated observers and relief. I contend that the format of twelfth and thirteenth century relief sculpture played a critical role in shaping the history and practice of late medieval and Renaissance pictorial systems. By building the illusion of three-dimensional forms from a flat, two-dimensional surface, sculptors could materially and spatially draw viewers into an illusion. Because of this, I argue, relief sculpture offered medieval artists a unique set of expressive possibilities and provided a model of pictorial representation that later painters aimed to emulate. My research tracks a history of Italian medieval relief from the revival of monumental sculpture in the late 11th century to 1435, when Alberti coined the term "rilievo" to describe a painterly technique. In a series of case studies involving extant reliefs on pilgrimage churches in Fidenza, Ferrara, Modena, and Verona (Italy), I examine the material and spatial properties of the sculptures and their architectural frame. I have discovered that optical refinements were used in the production of the tympanum reliefs at Ferrara and Verona, and I have shown how sculptors used material tactics-such as the manipulation of the depth of carving and the placement of figures-to secure certain vantage points from the ground. In Chapters One and Two, I reconstruct these points of view based on the archaeological data to show how sculptural objects elicited a specific set of viewing practices from medieval observers. My study elaborates on these findings in Chapter Three by placing them in dialogue with texts concerned with what I am calling "optical aesthetics". In Chapter Four, I demonstrate how my study requires rethinking the discourses of Renaissance perspective; in particular, it offers a reading of Leon Battista Alberti's "rilievo" as a response to the material forms of medieval sculptural relief.