EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

The eighteenth century saw two major shifts in scenographic paradigms that bore lasting consequences for theatre in France and beyond. The first of these was an aesthetic development with legible ramifications concerning political ideas: the decentering of vanishing points. This particular shift owed its theoretical genesis to Andrea Pozzo and its popularity in practice to the Galli-Bibiena family of scenic designers. Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena, who was trained by the Bolognese painter Carlo Cignani and theatrical engineer Ercole Rivani, worked with his brother and sons to build awe-inspiring perspective sets that broke the monotony of central vanishing-point perspective. The mutual approximation, in theory and practice, of spaces understood to be theatrical and those conceived as spaces of physical optics, was a defining turn in the way theatre space was understood in the modern era. This way of thinking became the bedrock of holistic critiques of perspective scenery in the early nineteenth century, such as that deployed by Joseph-Francois-Louis Grobert in 1809.