Perspective and Geometry in the Roman Painted Gardens

Garden painting is a very precise genre that is distinct from landscape painting. Present in Roman villas but also in tombs of the same period, it responds to some specific compositional rules. The structure of the representation, realized for the most part with the intent to break through the wall to obtain an illusory effect of expansion of space, responds to precise geometric characteristics. The article relates the structure, also geometric, of the Roman gardens with their pictorial representation, which derives from it its justification. In both cases, in fact, the composition is guided by the point of view under which the garden (real or imaginary) must be observed, and in both cases, there is a will to bend nature within rigidly geometric and symmetrical schemas. The sense of perspective recreated in the painted gardens offers at first glance a feeling of naturalness into the garden, which on closer observation reveals the artificiality of a unified and controlled point of view, of rigid symmetries and geometric relationships between the parts.

Keywords: Roman garden; Illusory perspective; Geometry; Symmetry; Painted garden; Naturalistic iconography