Rules · Cities · Façades · Optics
Line the principal street with the houses of great persons (palaces with regular fronts, cornices and pediments) receding to a monument, as in the stage set for tragedy; leave the humbler houses, shops and taverns of the comic scene to the side streets.
Serlio’s book on perspective ends with three stage sets developed from Vitruvius (V.6): the tragic scene, a street of palaces, arches and obelisks for the deeds of princes; the comic scene, a street of ordinary houses, shops, a tavern and an old-fashioned church for the doings of citizens; and the satyric scene, a wood with rustic huts. Each is a street in perspective, running to a vanishing point.
The sets were a demonstration of how a regular street should look, and planners of new towns used them in turn. In this town the six main streets from the piazza begin as tragic scenes of palaces and turn into comic scenes of houses and shops further out.
Front a basilican church with two storeys of the order: the lower as wide as nave and chapels, the upper as wide as the nave alone, joined by scrolls and crowned by a pediment.
Il Gesù (reconstructed): lower ≈ 34 m wide, upper ≈ 20 m; scrolls fill the difference
To unify a façade of two or more storeys, run a single order of pilasters or columns through all of them, from the base to the main cornice.
Lift the dome on a cylindrical or polygonal drum pierced with windows between the ring of the pendentives and the springing of the dome, to light the centre of the church and to make the dome visible from afar.
drum height ≈ ⅓–1 × its radius (Byzantine); much taller in Russian churches
A column is narrower at the top than at the bottom, but the taller the column the less it should be diminished, because distance already makes its top look smaller.
upper Ø : lower Ø = 5⁄6 (≤15 ft) · 11⁄13 (15–20 ft) · 6⁄7 (20–30 ft) · 13⁄15 (30–40 ft) · 7⁄8 (40–50 ft)
Keep the lowest third of the shaft cylindrical; above it, reduce the radius along a curve found by dividing a quarter-circle and the upper two-thirds of the shaft into the same number of equal parts.
r(k) = R · cos(α·k), cos α = r_top ⁄ R, k = 0…1 over the upper ⅔
When orders are placed one above another, put the stronger below and the more delicate above (Doric under Ionic under Corinthian), and make each upper column a quarter shorter than the one beneath.
upper column = ¾ lower column; order sequence: Tuscan → Doric → Ionic → Corinthian → Composite
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The street as a tragic scene”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/serlio-tragic-scene. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.