Architectural perspective

Before he ever came to Venice, Battaglioli painted stage sets in Modena, and it shows in everything here. This is an architectural capriccio, an invented palace of columns and receding arcades built purely to display command of perspective, with a few small figures dropped in to give the scale. That skill was his living twice over. In 1778 the Venetian academy made him its professor of perspective, the chair just vacated by the view-painter Antonio Visentini, and he held it for about a decade. The even, silvery light that fills these imaginary halls is the same light he had learned to throw across a theatre backdrop.