A conversation with Thomas McLucas, Giles Worsley Rome Fellow, in which he speaks about the work he has produced during his residency at the BSR from September to December 2024, ahead of the Winter Open Studios.
The work I have been doing as the Giles Worsley Fellow is an extension of research I started as part of the MA Architecture course at the Royal College of Art, where I focused on virtuality through the lens of illusionistic painting in the Baroque period and made connections to contemporary digital media. This previous work took the form of a comparative essay between The Painted Hall at Greenwich, widely considered to be the epitome of Baroque interior painting in England, and archetypal contemporary immersive experiences in fine art and advertising (Fig. 1). Using canonical texts, particularly Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque and Norberg-Shulz’s Baroque Architecture to identify a series of indicators defining the Baroque. I then argued that there appeared to be emergent properties in contemporary virtual media environments. In doing so I suggested that we might consider them and the techniques used in The Painted Hall to be similar systems. However, I realise these common properties exist across time and space, so what may be considered reflective of the style or spirit of an epoch, often resists this sort of categorisation.
In coming to Rome, I wanted to draw upon a broader pool of historic examples to look at the mechanics of these spaces, to understand what makes them effective as a medium rather than analyse the content of individual paintings. In doing so I have shifted my focus away from drawing an equivalence to contemporary technologies, towards reflecting on how we might apply the most successful aspects of these techniques to digital virtual architecture, while being considerate of the medium-specific opportunities and limitations of contemporary technologies.
In conducting this study, I am relying on a research-by-design approach, following study trips with experiments in screen and headset based mixed-reality. Key to this has been engaging with Andrea Pozzo’s Rules and Examples of Perspective Proper for Painters and Architects. First published in 1693, this manual was translated by John James (an assistant of Wren and Hawksmoor) into English in 1707, contemporaneous with James Thornhill’s plans for the interiors of the Painted Hall at Greenwich. As one of the earliest treatises on perspective techniques, I have been using the work as an entry-point to the mechanics of the illusory spaces I have visited, particularly those painted by Pozzo namely, the Camerette di Sant’Ignazio, the refectory of the Trinità dei Monti, and most famously the Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola (Fig. 2). I have drawn studies from Pozzo’s manual and overlayed 3D models of these drawings in augmented reality (Fig. 3). These models have been distorted to reveal the foreshortening in these forced perspectives, as well as allowing observers to make a connection to the importance of their position through anamorphosis. On a small scale, this highlights the perspective systems in the Baroque precedents: by making these virtual effects integral to the consumption of space, the user becomes implicated in the realisation of the architecture. The vanishing point gives the observer a body and a position. Therefore, as they are structurally integral to its composition, they are held in space by this effect.
During my visits I have become particularly interested in the blurring between the physical and virtual in moments where painting, sculpture and built architecture collide. I have found that the spaces where this phenomenon is most acute and condensed are often side chapels. Limited by space and with a density of content (patrons’ iconography, scenes of titular saints, reliquaries), these niches must radically extend space and depth to accommodate this function. On my study visits, key examples of this phenomenon have been the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria and the Chapel of Saint Sebastian at Sant’Agnese in Agone (Fig. 4). From this I have wondered what sort of built architecture might enhance our perception of virtual environments. In preparation for further studies of this typology I have produced a 3D model of the sixty-fourth figure in Pozzo’s manual: an altar which a user can place in VR, extending space beyond built walls (Fig. 5).
To situate contemporary examples within a genealogy of virtuality I have found it necessary to extend my research to the perspective techniques that lead to the baroque works which are my key points of reference. For this I travelled to Mantua and Parma to see the works of Giulio Romano, Andrea Mantegna (Fig. 6), and Correggio. These earlier works, innovative as they are in the development of interior painting, are still contained within the walls (frames) hosting them. As Wölfflin notes in Renaissance and Baroque, the Baroque “either omits the frame altogether or makes it seem inadequate to contain the bulging mass it encloses”. I postulate that in relation to contemporary virtual technologies we are currently still living in a time dominated by frames. In the examples I draw upon, the techniques used in Mannerist interiors such as the Palazzo Te (Fig. 7) and Villa Farnesina, which realise virtuality in pursuit of entertainment or grandeur, develop to become pedagogical tools dominating spaces dedicated to the function of religion and state in the following century. Within the 17th century too there is a movement from Pietro da Cortona’s framed ceiling at Palazzo Barberini in the 1630s, to the expression of content escaping a frame in Giovan Battista Gaulli’s Fresco for Il Gesu in the 1670s (Fig. 8), then to the total dissolution of the boundary between built and painted architecture in Pozzo’s spaces at the end of the century. As Pozzo suggests, “whence you may perceive that for designing things of this kind the painter ought to have no less skill in architecture than is required for the execution of solid works.” In my work I cannot pose any technological solutions to the limits of existing virtual tools, but I propose that there is the potential for us to draw parallels from these examples regarding where we are situated in the current development of digital virtuality. As these technologies proliferate and move from entertaining gimmicks to sophisticated tools for visual representation, we might ask: how will they form the built environment and how could we design a physical architecture for seamless digital augmentation?
