Quadro riportato
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Quadro riportato is the Italian phrase for "carried picture". It is used in art to describe easel paintings that are seen in a normal perspective and inserted into a decoration on a ceiling. The final effect is not similar to Illusionism.
Term applied to a ceiling picture that is intended to look as if it is a framed easel picture placed overhead; there is no illusionistic foreshortening, figures appearing as if they were to be viewed at normal eye level. Mengs's Parnassus (1761) in the Villa Albani (now Villa Torlonia), Rome, is a famous example—a kind of Neoclassical manifesto against Baroque illusionism. Often, however, quadro riportati were combined with illusionistic elements, as in Annibale Carracci's Farnese Ceiling (1597–1600) in Rome.