Preface (Architectural perspective in the Venetian Villas along the Riviera del Brenta in the Province of Venice)

This book publishes the researches on painted architectural perspective in the Venetian Villas of the Riviera del Brenta in the province of Venice, as a part of two wider university research projects. The artistic and cultural heritage included within them upon frescoed surfaces, not always accessible and sometimes in heavy decay conditions, constitutes a sort of interesting workshop both for representation scholars and for art and architecture historians: with the case studies here presented we would like to introduce a collaboration among different disciplines, which we consider potentially profitable and necessary. The intent to limit the choice of the architectural perspectives here presented to such a specific context, in fact, also invites to confront and link results which, by revealing the techniques employed by artists, contribute to a deeper historical analysis. The most advanced digital technologies for representation have been used for the survey of frescoes, through ultra-high resolution photographic hardware and software for automatic photomodeling and multi-stero matching, fit to translate into digital 3D models the architectural surfaces hosting the illusory spaces. For studying them, gathering and divulgation of the data are necessary because all of these perspectives offer a synthesis between the science of representation and art, so that their examination becomes an original development tool in the historical-scientific context. The authors of the essays here collected (professors, Ph.D., Ph.D. candidates and scholars) examined theories and methods of representation to research the painted tridimensional space, both where perspectives are only outlined and where the quadrature prove instead to have a symbiotic relation with the architecture hosting them. Their perspectival restitutions and 3D reconstructions highlight in fact a geometrical and spatial continuity, besides the illusionistic strength