10.54103/ai/19938
Art in general, more than other fields, appears to lie at the heart of immersivity. As argued by Oliver Grau, it is art that still deploys a considerable genealogy with examples that resonate with the immersivity as proposed in contemporaneity. It is the current immersivity that constructs “constellations” which, as Benjamin put it, dynamically enact “the history of art [as] the history of prophesies […] which can be written only starting from the point of view of an immediate present,” where “every present is determined by those images that are synchronous to it: each now is the now of a given knowability.” In the art history field, however, it is almost mandatory to re-evoke a fully mannerist ambience where “painting” creates – without the aid of particular instruments – the near-total immersion, acting fully on the passional dimension. The case in point is the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, made by Giulio Romano between 1532 and 1536 in Palazzo Te in Mantua. A stunning illusionist artifice that catapults the viewers into the heart of the ongoing event, to produce in them a sense of awe and estrangement beyond the “frame.”
application/pdf
2785-7433
19938
I
en
Lucia Corrain
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
Fiction
Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber Of The Giants
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon
2
Thematic Section
2023-12-28
2023-03-14
2023-12-28
2024-02-07
AN-ICON
Lucia Corrain
2023/12/28
10.54103/ai/19938
University of Bologna
2785-7433
I
Fiction
en
Zuliani, S., Spazi e tempi dell’installazione (Rome: Arshake, 2015).
Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber Of The Giants
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/19938/20021
2
               Art and Artifice:
               The Machine of
Immersivity in the Camera
dei Giganti/ Chamber
Of The GiImage
          ants
by Lucia Corrain
                   Immersivity
                   Giulio Romano
                   Painting
                   Fiction




                      Issue №1                Year 2023
                      → Immersions and Dives: From
                      the Environment to Virtual Reality
                      Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina,
                      Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello
Art and Artifice:
The Machine of Immersivity
in the Camera dei Giganti/
Chamber Of The Giants
LUCIA CORRAIN, Università degli Studi di Bologna – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8437-969X
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938


Abstract                        Art in general, more than other fields, appears
                  to lie at the heart of immersivity. As argued by Oliver Grau,
                  it is art that still deploys a considerable genealogy with
                  examples that resonate with the immersivity as proposed
                  in contemporaneity. It is the current immersivity that con-
                  structs “constellations” which, as Benjamin put it, dynam-
                  ically enact “the history of art [as] the history of prophesies
                  […] which can be written only starting from the point of
                  view of an immediate present,” where “every present is de-
                  termined by those images that are synchronous to it: each
                  now is the now of a given knowability.” In the art history
                  field, however, it is almost mandatory to re-evoke a fully
                  mannerist ambience where “painting” creates – without
                  the aid of particular instruments – the near-total immersion,
                  acting fully on the passional dimension. The case in point
                  is the Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants, made
                  by Giulio Romano between 1532 and 1536 in Palazzo Te
                  in Mantua. A stunning illusionist artifice that catapults the
                  viewers into the heart of the ongoing event, to produce in
                  them a sense of awe and estrangement beyond the “frame.”



Keywords         Image         Immersivity          Giulio Romano              Painting        Fiction
To quote this essay: L. Corrain, “Art and Artifice: The Machine of Immersivity in the Camera dei Giganti/
Chamber Of The Giants,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023):
56-73, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19938.

LUCIA CORRAIN                                      56                                           AN-ICON
A piece many years
in doing and now newly performed by that rare
Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself
eternity and could put breath into his work, would
beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her
ape.1
                                  By way of introduction

                            Undoubtedly – in a chronological field conven-
               tionally defined as Mannerism – the Camera dei Giganti/
               Chamber of the Giants, frescoed between 1532 and 1536
               by Giulio Romano and his collaborators in Palazzo Te in
               Mantua, occupies a position of great importance. The high-
               ly original solution adopted by the Roman artist, already
               acknowledged in his day and age, in the light of today’s
               immersive technologies, can indeed manifest all its extraor-
               dinary innovative force.2
                            Virtual reality, as we know it today, is obtained
               by means of a digital instrument capable of generating
              “three-dimensional” scenes, narratives and landscapes
               within which subjects have the impression of actually mov-
               ing and interacting with the ambience surrounding them.
               Thanks to the evolution in computer graphics and the imple-
               mentation of the computational power, representations ever




      1 W. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (1611) (New York-London-Toronto-Sydney: Simon &
      Schuster Paperbacks, 1998): V.II.95-100, 219.
      2 The bibliography concerning Palazzo Te is currently rather substantial, but it was Ernst
      Gombrich who took this whole building outside of the shadows in which it found itself. In 1933
      he dedicated to it his graduation thesis at the University of Vienna, E. Gombrich, “Der Palazzo
      del Te,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 8 (1934): 79-104; “Versuch
      einer Deuteung,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, no. 9 (1936): 121-150;
      it. trans. A.M. Conforti, Giulio Romano. Il palazzo del Te (Mantua: Tre Lune, 1984). Cfr. among
      the many others F. Hart, Giulio Romano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958); K.W. Forster,
      R.J. Tuttle, “The Palazzo del Te,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30, no. 4
      (1971): 267-293; A. Belluzzi, W. Capezzali, II palazzo dei lucidi inganni: Palazzo Te a Mantova
      (Florence: Centro Studi Architettura Ouroboros, 1976); E. Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in
      Mantua: Images of Love and Politics (Baltimore-London: The John Hopkins University Press,
      1977); A. Belluzzi, M. Tafuri, eds., Giulio Romano (Milan: Electa, 1989, exhibition catalogue);
      A. Belluzzi, Palazzo Te a Mantova, 2 vols. (Modena: Cosimo Panini, 1998). About the Camera
      dei Giganti/Chamber of Giants specifically, cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: Palazzo Te (Milan: Skira,
      2020).

LUCIA CORRAIN                                    57                                            AN-ICON
               closer to reality can be obtained. Nonetheless, so-called
              “reality media” are not yet a “perfect” mimesis of the real.3
                            The relationship between the current immersive
               devices and the more dated optical instruments of the so-
               called pre-cinematographic phase has already been widely
               brought to light: it is the case of the scene of the eighteenth
               century4 and the stereoscope of the subsequent century5
               that share, with the more recent immersive technologies,
               the question of a “channelled aesthetic perception.”6 In
               rather similar fashion, at the pictorial level, the Quadratur-
               ismo and the trompe-l’œil raise questions relating to both
               the continuity between the space of experience and the
               space represented, and to the methods of construction of
               a gaze “from the inside” in which proximity allows for the
               perception of esthesis, verdictives and passion.
                            Oliver Grau7 – the scholar who perhaps more
               than any other has outlined a genealogy of immersivity –
               has identified a possible origin even in Pompeian painting,
               to then look to the Renaissance and Baroque illusionist
               spaces, all the way down to the more recent scenarios




      3 E. Modena, Nelle storie: Arte, cinema e media immersivi (Rome: Carocci, 2022); A.
      Pinotti, “VR, AR, MR, XR,” in Enciclopedia dell’Arte Contemporanea, vol. 4 (Rome: Istituto
      dell’Enciclopedia Italiana “Giovanni Treccani,” 2021): 685-686.
      4 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2001), trans. G. Custance (Cambridge MA:
      MIT Press, 2003).
      5 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
      (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1992).
      6 P. Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità: Estetica e immaginazione interattiva (Milan: Raffaello
      Cortina, 2014): 25.
      7 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, opens his reconnaissance on the Pompeian
      frescoes, where the creation of a pictorial surface with the simulation of depth generates
      the effect of an ambience of greater extension that what it is in reality, capturing the gaze of
      the observer who does not seem to perceive the actual distinction between real space and
      the space of the image. Grau then lists the subsequent examples: the Chamber of the Deer
      in the Avignon Palace of the Popes (1343); the Hall of Perspectives by Baldassare Peruzzi
      in villa Farnesina (1516), the neoclassical “village rooms” or “sylvans.” The latter is a kind
      that, “while it dilates to the extreme the portrait of landscape taking it to the dimensions of
      the environmental room, it applies at the same time scenic criteria relevant to organising the
      decorations unitarily, with the illusionist effect of the plein air,” R. Roli, Pittura bolognese 1650-
      1800: Dal Cignani ai Gandolfi (Bologna: Alfa Edizioni, 1977): 70 [my translation].

LUCIA CORRAIN                                      58                                             AN-ICON
              (panorama).8 Grau, however, does not refer specifically to
              the striking example of the Chamber of the Giants, where
              the immersivity reaches a very high level of passional in-
              volvement on the part of the spectator, moreover without
              resorting to an auxiliary devices (as is the case today with
              headsets, overalls). A stunning illusionistic artifice defined
              by Frederick Hart as “surely the most fantastic and fright-
              ening creation of the entire Italian Renaissance in any medi-
              um”9 capable of catapulting the spectator into the heart of
              the event portrayed; as stated in 1934 by Ernst Gombrich:
             “into the deafening vortex of a frightening catastrophe,”10
              capable of engendering astonishment and awe.11
                           Harking back to the renowned words of Wal-
              ter Benjamin: “the history of art is a history of prophecies”
              which “can only be written from the standpoint of the im-
              mediate, actual present,”12 where “every present day is
              determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each
             “now” is the now of a particular recognizability.”13 It can be
              stated that the case we wish to investigate here can be con-
              sidered in the light of a premise. In short, the machine fres-
              coed in the Chamber of the Giants in Palazzo Te appears
              to be the height of an illusion that involves the spectator in
              a dimension that can be defined as being fully immersive.
                           Moreover, if we carefully observe, in the cham-
              ber in question of Palazzo Te, all the “instructions […] which

      8 In 1792 Robert Baker, in London, made the first Panorama, which consists in a circular
      shaped ambience, where on the interior walls are projected images of times of distant places,
      offering the chance to the spectators of having a travel experience whilst being “stationary.”
      Cfr., besides O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, also S. Bordini, Storia del
      panorama: La visione totale della pittura nel XIX secolo (Rome: Nuova Cultura, 2009); M.
      Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini: Letteratura e cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina,
      2012); M. Cometa, Cultura visuale (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2021). E. Gombrich, Giulio
      Romano: 94, in 1934 had already related the Chamber of the Giants with the nineteenth
      century panoramas, stating: “that indeed Giulio, and he alone, was the first to try out in a work
      of art that which is called the hall of the Giants” [my translation].
      9 F. Hart, Giulio Romano: 32.
      10 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79.
      11 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Turin: Einaudi, 2021):
      107-109, in the chapter dedicated to the environment-image states that the Chamber of the
      Giants is a paradigmatic example, “an illusionistic machine that invites one to reflect on the
      viewer’s visual act as a participative response to the iconic act.”
      12 W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1, no. 2:1046-7. Quoted
      in English in B. Doherty, “Between the Artwork and its ‘Actualization’: A Footnote to Art History
      in Benjamin’s Work of Art,” Paragraph 32, no. 3 (2009): 331-358, 336.
      13 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1982), trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge MA:
      Harvard University Press, 2003): 462-463.

LUCIA CORRAIN                                   59                                           AN-ICON
                [in the planar paintings] direct the gaze, guide the reading,
                intimidate and can, at times, seduce the viewer subjecting
                them to the representation,”14 have been completely dis-
                avowed.15 They have been totally cancelled. And, not by
                chance, in their place some decidedly more cogent ones
                have been created in an interplay of different disciplines,
                taking one another by the hand, offering a wholly original
                reading of the Chamber in question that can fully manifest
                the active nature of perception.

                                  An exceptional visitor

                             Let us now try to enter the Chamber of the
                Giants, highlighting its most salient characteristics. And
                we shall do so starting from an exceptional witness, Gior-
                gio Vasari (Arezzo, 1511-1574), the art historian who was
                able to visit the Mantuan Palazzo Te on two occasions:
                the first time when the Chamber of the Giants was under
                construction; the second when the works had already been
                completed. His testimony can to all intents and purposes
                be considered an ekphrasis of great efficacy that “overlaps
                with the pictorial [story], and at times gives the impression
                of eclipsing it.”16 Here is the description Vasari gives of the
                space created and painted by Giulio Romano:

After laying deep, double foundations in that corner, which was in a
swampy spot, Giulio had built over that angle a large, round room
with extremely thick walls, so that the four corners of the outside
walls would be stronger and could support a double vault rounded
like an oven. And having done this, since the room had corners,
he built here and there all the way around it the doors, windows,
and a fireplace of rusticated stones with worn-away edges, which

      14 G. Careri, “Prefazione,” in L. Marin, Opacità della pittura: Sulla rappresentazione nel
      Quattrocento (Florence: La Casa Usher, 2012): 7-13.
      15 On the role of the frame in the work of art see D. Ferrari, A. Pinotti, eds., La cornice: Storie,
      teorie, testi (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2018) and S. Zuliani, Spazi e tempi dell’installazione (Rome:
      Arshake, 2015).
      16 A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 446 [my translation]. On the text/image problem cfr. W.J.T.
      Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: The
      University of Chicago Press, 2015).

LUCIA CORRAIN                                     60                                            AN-ICON
were disjointed and crooked almost to the extent that they
                                                         17
                                                            even
seemed to lean over on one side and actually to collapse.
                              Giulio Romano – as can be inferred – gave a
                particular form to the environment: it is not a “round room,”
                as Vasari might lead us to believe, but a “a double vault
                rounded like an oven,” which did not have sharp corners
                and whose doors and windows were “disjointed and crook-
                ed,” which almost certainly means that the windows were
                closed by painted blinds and the doors were in continuity
                with respect to the frescoes.
                              A singular space, which also disposed of a par-
                ticular flooring, as confirmed by Vasari himself:

He had made the floor with polished river slingstones that ran
around the walls, and those on the painting plane, which fell down-
wards had counterfeited: for a part those painted inwards escaped,
and at times were
                18
                   occupied and adorned by grass and at times
by larger stones.
                            But, as can well be imagined, it was, in those
                days, a cobbled floor with slingstones that, albeit creating
                seamless continuity with the upright walls, did not represent
                an assurance of a steady support for the visitor.19
                            It is not possible, however, to be outside the
                space to talk about it; you need to traverse it to know it, for
      17 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella,
      P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 370. In the first edition by types of
      Lorenzo Torrentino (Florence, 1550), the historiographer was even more articulate: “He
      therefore had double foundations of great depth sunk at that corner, which was in a marshy
      place, and over that angle he constructed a large round room, with very thick walls, to the end
      that the four external corners of the masonry might be strong enough to be able to support
      a double vault, round after the manner of an oven. This done, he caused to be built at the
      corners right round the room, in the proper places, the doors, windows, and fireplace, all of
      rustic stones rough-hewn as if by chance, and, as it were, disjointed and awry, insomuch
      that they appeared to be really hanging over to one side and falling down).” G. Vasari, “Giulio
      Romano pittore e architetto,” in Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani
      (1550) (Turin: Einaudi, 1986): 833 [my translation].
      18 Ibidem: 834 [my translation].
      19 The flooring was made anew by Paolo Pozzo in the eighteenth-century restoration of the
      palazzo, in which very likely the fireplace of which Vasari speaks was bricked up, and which
      is testified to in some drawings preserved at the Louvre, Windsor and Palazzo Te (donated in
      2015 by Monroe Warshaw), cfr. R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 27. Furthermore, in 1781, the archduke
      Ferdinand of Habsburg commissioned Giovanni Bottani to “have made a picket fence in
      the hall of the Giants […]. Also, he would promptly have the fireplace sealed and walled up,”
      citation reported in A. Belluzzi, Giulio Romano: 236.

LUCIA CORRAIN                                     61                                             AN-ICON
                it to become a true object of analysis. The analysts must
                become an integral part of the space, immerse themselves
                in it like a percipient body, like the users of the place, going
                through it and letting themselves be guided by the logic
                imposed by the context in which they find themselves. The
                visitors are, so to speak, literally “manipulated” by this un-
                usual spatial environment.
                               The system of the spatial expression is in it-
                self meaningful, that here acquires an even more complete
                meaning with what is portrayed on the walls: the signifi-
                cance of the space is “the final result of a stratified and
                complex series of procedures, articulations and sub-artic-
                ulations, where an element is meaningful only if related to
                the others.”20
                               The spatial configurations prefigure, that is, the
                virtuality, of the possible ways of using the morphology
                itself of the places. In this sense, a semiotic reading can
                come to our aid which – as Giannitrapani writes – “consid-
                ers space not as a straightforward container of subjects,
                objects, events, but as a meaningful structure capable of
                speaking of a multiplicity of aspects of life.”21 This means
                that: “The significance of the space lies in the efficacious
                action that it provokes on the subjects coming into contact
                with it.” And in order for space to completely “influence the
                body it must work on the ambience, it must give a shape
                to the architecture of the space.”22

                                 The Fall of the Giants

                            There is no doubt that the space of the Cham-
                bers of the Giants, already in itself significant, finds fulfil-
                ment with what it portrayed on the ceiling and on the walls.
                Although this interest of this analysis is focused on the
                immersive dimension, it is necessary to briefly go over the

      20 G. Marrone, “Efficacia simbolica dello spazio: Azioni e passioni,” in P. Bertetti, G. Manetti,
      eds., Forme della testualità: Teoria, modelli, storia e prospettive (Turin: Testo&immagine, 2001):
      85-96.
      21 A. Giannitrapani, Introduzione alla semiotica dello spazio (Rome: Carrocci, 2013): 45.
      22 On the space cfr. also M. Hammad, Lire l’espace, comprendre l’architecture (Limoges:
      Presses Universitaires, 2001), trans. G. Festi (Rome: Meltemi, 2003).

LUCIA CORRAIN                                    62                                           AN-ICON
                iconography of the whole figurative apparatus because ̶ as
                we shall see – it is closely related to Federico II Gonzaga,
                the patron, and Charles V over whose empire the sun never
                set. The whole room, as is well-known, portrays the fall of
                the Giants drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.23 The myth
                tells of the giants’ attempted attack on the gods: with the
                intent to reach Mount Olympus, the vicious inhabitants of
                the earth superimpose one another on two mountains, that
                of Pelion and that of Ossa.
                              Portrayed on the ceiling (Fig. 1) is the gods’ ire
                against the giants’ attempt to scale the mountains, with
                Jupiter who abandons his throne to place himself along-
                side Juno, who, with her gaze and index finger, points to
                the direction towards which to cast the thunderbolts. The
                plot hatched by the giants fails, of course, and Jupiter’s
                intervention makes the mountains collapse; by tumbling
                precipitously, they overwhelm the giants burying them be-
                neath the heavy boulders. A daring view from the bottom
                upwards, always on the ceiling, portrays a circular temple
                with twelve columns from whose balustrade some char-
                acters, concerned and awestruck by what is happening
                beneath them, look out; in the same way the numerous
                other divinities display impassioned states of agitation. The
                throne, left vacant by Jupiter, is occupied by the imperial
                eagle with its wings outspread, while the menacing clouds
                surround the whole empyrean in a role of transition from
                the world of the gods to the terrestrial terrain of the com-
                mon mortals.
                              On the walls, above the fireplace, the giant Ty-
                phon (monstruous son of Gaia – Fig. 2) is depicted: for
                having tried to depose Jupiter, he is struck by lightning and
                sinks under Etna, and here, crushed by the boulders, in an
                attempt to defend himself he spews fire and lapilli causing
                an earthquake.24 The fireplace, in turn, was supposed to
                suggest the illusion of the youth condemned by the flames:
                the flames that issue from the mouth of the giant Typhon,

      23 Ovid, Metamorphoses I vv. 151-154 (I A.D), trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University
      Press, 2008): 5.
      24 Ovid, Metamorphoses V: 109.

LUCIA CORRAIN                                  63                                          AN-ICON
                                                                                   Fig. 1. G. Romano,
                                                            Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants,
                                                              ceiling, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te.


                in the pictorial fiction, thus ended up “conversing” with the
                real fire of the fireplace.
                              Examining more closely the remaining frescoed
                parts, Vasari took note of further details:

the entire world is upside-down and almost at its final end [...] many
giants can be seen in flight, all struck down by Jove’s thunderbolts
and on the verge of being overwhelmed by the landslides from the
mountains just like the others. In another part, Giulio represented
other giants upon whom are crashing down temples, columns, and
other parts of buildings, creating
                              25
                                     among these arrogant creatures
great havoc and loss of life.
                             And, in actual fact, three walls propose land-
                scapes (Figg. 3-4) and another one proposes an architec-
                ture – a serliana – that too about to collapse under the fire
                of the lightning bolts of the gods (Fig. 5).




       25 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P.
       Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372.

LUCIA CORRAIN                                    64                                            AN-ICON
                            Fig. 2. G. Romano,                            Fig. 3. G. Romano,
     Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants,     Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants,
      wall est, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te.      wall sud, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te.




                             Fig. 4. G. Romano,                           Fig. 5. G. Romano,
     Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants,     Camera dei Giganti/Chamber of the Giants,
     wall ovest, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te.    wall nord, 1532-1536, Mantua, Palazzo Te.

LUCIA CORRAIN                                 65                                   AN-ICON
                             At this point it is worthwhile turning our atten-
                tion to the time when the action portrayed takes place.
                The time in itself is not representable, it is represented by
                means of movement and transformation: it is a function of
                the movement and the last is a function of space. Any ac-
                tion, which is never a perpetual motion, contains phases: a
                beginning, a climax and an end. In the course of each one
                of those, every action leads to the memory of what had
                come before and what will come afterwards. In short, the
                climax is the moment of utmost tension. In the Chamber
                of the Giants it corresponds to the phase when everything
                collapses: the technique is that of breaking down natural
                and architectural elements into parts that gradually lose
                their natural order to follow one that has gone completely
                haywire. If it is true that the rendering of the fatal moment
                is accentuated in mannerism, it can be said that here it has
                touched some very elevated heights.
                             The particularity of the fatal instant had been
                highlighted, once again, by Vasari (Fig. 6):




                                                               Fig. 6. G. Romano,
                                                              Camera dei Giganti/
                                                            Chamber of the Giants,
                                                               detail of the Giant,
                                                                       1532-1536,
                                                              Mantua, Palazzo Te.




LUCIA CORRAIN                          66                                AN-ICON
Giulio [...] made plans to build a corner-room [...] in which the walls
would correspond with the paintings, in order
                                          26
                                              to deceive the people
who would see it as much as he could.
                                a marvellous work where

the entire painting has neither beginning nor end, and that it is all
tied together
         27
              and runs on continuously without boundary or dec-
oration.
                           This is a room completely without frames,28 of
                any delimitation, with an enveloping continuity, in which
                the space – as Gombrich points out –

runs homogeneous to the floor as far as the apex of the roof
with not edges and no frame to interrupt the seamlessness of the
surfaces, it is completely transformed into a pictorial scene: it is29
part of a single action, animated by the same emotional impetus.
                                But, Vasari adds, it is a horrible scene:

Therefore, let no one ever imagine seeing a work from the brush
that is more horrible or frightening or more realistic than this one.
And anyone who enters that room and sees the windows, doors,
and other such details all distorted and almost on the verge of
crashing down, as well as the mountains and buildings collapsing,
can only fear that everything is toppling down upon him. Especially
when he sees    30
                   all the gods in that heaven running this way and
that in flight.
                            In short, a stunning illusionistic artifice that
                seeks to catapult the viewer into the throbbing heart of
                the event in progress, where “the boundaries of space

       26 Ibid.: 370.
       27 Ibid.: 373.
       28 Cfr. P. Carabell, “Breaking the Frame: Transgression and Transformation in Giulio Romano’s
       Sala dei Giganti,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 36 (1997): 87-100.
       29 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81.
       30 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P.
       Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372-373.

LUCIA CORRAIN                                  67                                         AN-ICON
                disappear [...] and the laws of statics, in which the eye
                can find tranquillizing points of reference, are completely
                lacking.”31 Inside the environment: “the walls themselves
                move and, soon, everything is disarranged and collapses
                upon the viewer” who, in this way, shares “the same fate
                that submits and destroys the very powerful giants that
                tried in vain to sustain the walls.”32 (Figg. 7-8)




                                                                    Fig. 7. G. Romano,
                                                                   Camera dei Giganti/
                                                               Chamber of the Giants,
                                                       detail of the Giant, 1532-1536,
                                                                   Mantua, Palazzo Te.




                                                          Fig. 8. G. Romano, copy of,
                                                   Disegno della parete con il camino,
                                                      Paris, Louvre, Département des
                                                     Arts graphiques, inv. 3636, recto




      31 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 79.
      32 Ibid.

LUCIA CORRAIN                              68                               AN-ICON
                                 Being at the end of the world

                            At this point – and to delve once more into the
               immersivity that generates the environment – it comes nat-
               ural to wonder why the patron, duke Federico II Gonzaga,
               decided to make such a particular and unique ambience
               in what is considered to be his villa of pleasures. What role
               would the Chamber of the Giants play in that precise his-
               torical moment?33 We should not try to imagine the visitor
               guided by the Lord of Mantua in the palazzo: Federico II
               leads his guest in a space whose boundaries are well de-
               fined, through ambiences of different sizes, decorated with
               specific iconographic themes, in a crescendo that takes
               him gradually as far as the Chamber of the Giants. An ini-
               tiatory pathway through which the duke proposes to his
               guest a sort of progressive estrangement with respect to
               the real world and that reaches its climax in the immense
              “catastrophe” of the dark cave, with the doors and win-
               dows shut and only the flickering light coming from the lit
               fireplace. A status of anguish and terror, apparently with
               no exit, in which the guest “with the highest mastery is de-
               prived of every chance to take a distance, to evaluate the
               actual spaces.”34 In this regard, Ernst Gombrich’s personal
               experience seems truly exemplary:

The kind of oppression that we have experienced is absolutely
new and the sentiment from which it is born and which Giulio has
been able to give shape to, is that of anguish. [...] There, we have
experienced directly and in an absolutely new way the anguished
nightmare of our involvement in an ineluctable catastrophe.35




       33 The Duke of Mantua invested colossal amounts and a special interest in the project for
       Palazzo Te: a work that had no residential function, which was not a fortress and in which even
       a room, that of the Giants, was in no way inhabitable.
       34 E. Gombrich, Giulio Romano: 81 [my traslation].
       35 Ibid.: 111 [my translation].

LUCIA CORRAIN                                   69                                          AN-ICON
                             Who is behind the enormous cave remains,
              therefore, captured by the representation, perceiving step
              by step that everything is being twisted, being destroyed:
              in the room lit up only by the fire burning in the fireplace,
              the visitor “experiences” the end of the world just as it is
              taking place, he experiences the torment – as Vasari writes
             – “that everything [...] is toppling down upon him.”36
                             It is important to understand what happens to
              the viewer’s body and how the space substantiated in the
              representation is capable of triggering sensorial percep-
              tions. As seems obvious, one’s eyesight is the first sense
              brought into play, and not only because the visitor’s eye is
              engaged by the enormous eyes of the Giants, but rather by
              the particular luminosity of the environment: indeed, one’s
              eyes must adapt to the light conditions produced by the
              fire in the fireplace; entering the ambience from conditions
              of full light, the adaptation to the poor light comes about
              slowly, one’s pupils must dilate as much as possible to be
              able to embrace the vision. The fireplace fire, moreover, is
              also responsible for the arousal of other senses: the sense
              of smell, because the burning wood diffuses its smell in all
              of the room; the sense of hearing, owing to the crackling
              and the rustling of the burning wood; the sense of touch,
              in that the fire warms up the ambience and consequent-
              ly the visitor. Even the flooring can fall within the tactile
              sensoriality – in “small, round stones,” but “set in with a
              knife” –37 which make the visitor’s movements unstable,
              reinforcing the precipice effect that is the central theme of
              the ambience.
                             Amongst those who in the course of time have
              had the chance to live a sensorial experience inside the
              Chamber of the Giants we can also name a scientist like
              Ulisse Aldrovandi (Bologna, 1522-1605): his interest, in
              particular, is addressed to the sonorous refraction of the
              ambience on the basis of which a word whispered in one


      36 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano,” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella, P.
      Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 372.
      37 G. Vasari, “Giulio Romano:” 373.

LUCIA CORRAIN                                   70                                            AN-ICON
                corner is perfectly heard in the opposite corner.38 Ultimately,
                the tremulous, mobile and never total illumination produced
                by the flames in the fireplace, the sonority itself of the fire,
                the amplified voice, the insecurity that the visitor experi-
                ences owing to the “stones set in edge” of the flooring, are
                all aspects that confer a powerful dynamicity to the whole,
                generating what can be defined a proto-cinematographic
                effect or, paradoxically, a distressing trompe-l’œil that at
                length deceives the feelings of the viewer.39
                             In practice, what did this exceptional spatial
                and sensorial machine which acts with such terrifying effi-
                cacy on the viewer try to convey? Undoubtedly, the icono-
                graphic subject was not chosen by chance; in fact, the
                mythological fable is accompanied by an interpretative
                tradition of a moral sort: the Gigantomachia is an example
                of chastised pride, with Jupiter who performs an act of
                supremacy to restore justice. And in Mantua, in the early
                Cinquecento, the imperial ideology resorted to the fall of
                the Giants to celebrate the victories of Charles V against
                the infidels; Jupiter thus prefigures Charles V who, in the
                guise of Jupiter, leads to the demise of the Italian princ-
                es who rebelled against his sovereignty.40 Alongside this
                reading of international politics, however, another one of
                a purely local sort gains headway: “Jupiter would be the
                ambitious Federico who, amongst other things, chooses
                to insert in the family coat of arms precisely the feat of
                Mount Olympus.”41 Whoever enters the Chamber of the
                Giants, in short, is put in contact with the ineluctability of
                the sovereignty of the gods against the “bestiality” of the
      38 D.A. Franchini, C. Tellini Perina, A. Zanca, R. Margonari, G. Olmi, R. Signorini, La scienza
      a corte: Collezionismo eclettico, natura e immagine a Mantova fra Rinascimento e Manierismo
      (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979): 192-194. The manuscript is cited (136, XXI, cc. 27v-29v), preserved in
      the University Library of Bologna in which Aldrovandi tells of his journeys to Mantua and, in
      particular, to the Chamber of the Giants.
      39 S.A. Hickson, “More than meets the eye: Giulio Romano, Federico II Gonzaga, and the
      triumph of trompe-l’œil at the Palazzo Te in Mantua,” in L. A. Boldt-Irons, C. Federici, E.
      Virgulti, eds., Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l’oeil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York:
      Peter Lang, 2009): 41-59.
      40 For a more detailed argumentation cfr. D. Sogliani, M. Grosso, eds., L’imperatore e il
      duca: Carlo V a Mantova (Milan: Skira, 2023). The exhibition offers a reflection on the cultural
      meaning of Europe starting from the figure of Charles V and his alliances with the Italian courts,
      narrating the emperor’s arrival in Mantua in 1530, feted by grand celebrations that Federico II
      Gonzaga organised in the halls of Palazzo Te under the masterful direction of Giulio Romano.
      41 R. Piccinelli, I Giganti: 19.

LUCIA CORRAIN                                    71                                           AN-ICON
                Giants. A clear message addressed to recalling the correct
                moral and political behaviour to engage in vis-à-vis those
                who hold power.

                                 By way of conclusion

                              As will have become apparent by now, the
                Chamber of the Giants avails itself of a perceptive setting
                foreshadowing what, almost five centuries later, finds a re-
                newed materialisation in the most advanced technologies of
                construction of the images that see, in the progressive can-
                cellation of the aesthetic threshold and the disappearance
                of the “frontier” between the world of representation and
                that of reality, their final point of arrival. The ambience-im-
                ages that emerge are capable of generating an effect of
                reality so immanent that whoever perceives them has the
                feeling of being part of that fictitious world. And the spec-
                tators, wearing a visor “that blinds them with respect to the
                physical reality that surrounds them,”42 isolate themselves
                completely from the real world. But if – as Elisabetta Mode-
                na writes – “the immersion occurs […] mostly according
                to a process of environmental reduction: the format of the
                experiences is central, [as is] that entanglement that is cre-
                ated between the image world and the experiencer who,
                in becoming a part of it, experiences what […] happens in
                history.”43
                             The spatial-pictorial construction of the Cham-
                ber of the Giants, without a frame, with interruptions, must
                in short be considered – as noted by Andrea Pinotti – the
                perfect example ante litteram that “it is certainly not neces-
                sary to await contemporaneity to witness the advent of an
                immersive and enveloping space.”44 This does not prevent
                us from testing the new immersive technologies to try to


      42 E. Modena, Nelle storie: 145. Cfr. also E. Modena “Immersi nel reale: Prospettive an-
      iconiche sull’arte contemporanea dall’ambiente alla realtà virtuale,” Carte Semiotiche. Rivista
      internazionale di semiotica e teoria dell’immagine, L. Corrain, M. Vannoni, eds., Annali 7,
      Figure dell’immersività (2021): 71-78.
      43 Ibid.: 146.
      44 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine: 109.

LUCIA CORRAIN                                   72                                           AN-ICON
             ‘simulate’ in every part the original ambience,45 proposing,
              through virtual reality, what can no longer be perceived
              in situ today. By introducing, from the top of the chimney
              stack, the photons into the hearth and making use of high
              definition orthophotographs of the walls and the ceiling, we
              virtually recreate the flickering light of the flames, as well
              as the sensorial effect of the heat as they must have been
              perceived in the original Chamber of the Giants. Ultimately,
              if Giulio Romano was a full-fledged forerunner of immersive
              environments, then the new technologies can represent a
              further aid to fully restoring the original perception of the
              Chamber of the Giants, leading us back to the ingenious
             “invention” that the artist had made for his cultured and
              refined patron. With an apt reference, through the anticlas-
              sical taste for the outlandish and for contamination, to that
              Mannerism that – in the vulgate of Giorgio Vasari – must
              contain “an abundance of beautiful costumes, variety in
              imaginative details, charm in their colours, diversity in their
              buildings, and distance and variety in their landscapes;” in
              short, “a copious invention in every particular.”46




      45 The bibliography on immersivity in the contemporary is vast: M. A. Moser, D. MacLeod,
      eds., Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996);
      W. Wolf, W. Bernhart, A, Mahler, eds., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature
      and Other Media (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2013); R. Pinto, “La mostra come esperienza
      immersive: Damien Hirst – Treasures from the Wrech of the Unbelievable,” in C.G. Morandi,
      C. Sinigaglia, eds., L’esperienza dello spazio: Collezioni, mostre, musei, (Bologna: Bononia
      University Press, 2020): 324-334; J. Voorhies, J. Postsensual, Aesthetics: On the Logic of
      the Curatorial (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). Cfr. also P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics
      (Milan: Mimesis International, 2020) and the recent J. Bodin, A. De Cesaris, eds., “Immersivity:
      Philosophical Perspectives on Technologically Mediated Experience,” Philosophical
      Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age 10, no. 20 (2022).
      46 G. Vasari, “Preface to Part Three” in The Lives of the Artists (1568), trans. J.C. Bondanella,
      P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 278.

LUCIA CORRAIN                                   73                                           AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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