A Digital Experiment in Reconstructing Ancient Roman Perspective Spaces

First Steps Toward a New Model

Abstract

The study of ancient Greco-Roman perspective constructions has long been subject to debate. One aspect of this debate has revolved around the apparently conflicting testimonies provided by relatively meager surviving textual sources— especially those of the architectural theorist Vitruvius—and scant material remains, particularly in the form of late Republican Roman wall painting. Using Rhino, a digital modeling software, this initial report on ongoing research proposes a new model of ancient perspective construction that seeks to accommodate both Vitruvius’s texts and extant Roman wall painting dated to the mid- to late-first century BCE. It considers the built environment in which the painting was produced, the surface of the painted wall, and the fictive space it depicts. The geometric flexibility and the ability to work across multiple planes with 3D modeling software permits the reconstruction of the method today; in antiquity, however, it would have been intuitively produced using relatively simple tools and limited theoretical knowledge.