Publication Details

Abstract

The geometrical principles of perspective have been thoroughly analysed and well understood. Nevertheless it is strange, that also the question of the relationship between painting and geometry is thus considered to be exhausted. The aim of the paper is to push the study of the analogies between painting and geometry further, through mannerism to baroque. Its basic thesis is, that some paintings of the high baroque as Les Meninas of Diego Velázquez or some of the illusionistic decorations painted by Andrea Pozzo have the same pictorial form (in the sense of Wittgenstein's Tractatus) as the picture embodied in the texts on non-Euclidean geometry (Lobachevsky, Beltrami). Thus the basic technical innovations, which were used by Lobachevsky and Beltrami in their discovery of the non-Euclidean geometry, were more than a century earlier developed by the baroque painters.