Representing Three Dimensions

Ancient painting made little or no use of single-point perspective. Some modern scholars, however, have inferred from this that ancient artists and audiences lacked a sense of “space.” This chapter’s three case studies (two involving fresco painting and one low-relief stucco, all in the genre generally known as sacro-idyllic landscape) argue instead for the existence a diversity of ways of encoding spatial information. The approaches are distinct, but they show family resemblances by drawing differentially from more or less the same pool of strategies (involving color coding, scaling, and foreshortening of objects of predictable size and shape, physical overlap, narrative connection, and others). In combination, these do not determine a single spatial reading for any given work of art, but they constrain the range of plausible approximations. That several superficially diverse sets of works converge on this property shows that spatiality was important to all of them.