Il paliotto dell’altare maggiore della chiesa di S. Lucia alla Badia a Siracusa: il carattere illusorio di una prospettiva architettonica scultorea

Within the context of the artistic Baroque production in the area around Syracuse, religious architecture has an important role. Its furnishings, on a small scale, are real jewels whose figurative aspects refer to the themes of architecture itself. The carried out research focused on the highly symbolic and recurrent theme of the Solomonic order and on the twisted columns which evoke those of the destroyed Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. The case study deals with the high altar in the church of St. Lucia alla Badia, in Ortygia, Syracuse, The artefact has a high architectural value revealed through a central perspective view representing a real architectural scene. The presence of the twisted columns offers the opportunity to further embellish the scene which contains the three arts altogether: drawing architecture and sculpture. The geometric analysis and the digital representation with modern 3D rendering technology, through the reconstruction of the architectural space suggest hypotheses about the inspiration of the scene. Decoding the perspective is useful in order to detect the lines that lie at the root of the creative process and that allow reasoning and comparisons.