As architectural images became vehicles for natural philosophical thinking and practices, they also challenged certain conventions of architectural design. Dietterlin’s Architectura upended enduring principles of architectural naturalism and stability promoted in Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria by developing a genre of amorphous ornaments that resembled the internal forms of the human body while effacing the conventional distinctions between architectural structure and surface, interior and exterior. Dietterlin derived these corporeal ornaments from empirically oriented images such as anatomical flap prints and the woodcuts of Vesalius’s De corporis fabrica. As architects and artists in northern Europe adopted the Architectura’s anatomical ornaments, they revealed the limits of architectural naturalism. Paradoxically, the waxing role of architectural images as tools for studying and embodying nature destabilized architecture’s long-standing traditions of naturalistic design.

The stage and sets for Euridice were designed by the Florentine artist Lodovico Cardi, called “Il Cigoli.” His invoice survives, as do an inventory of their elements made when they were disassembled and put into storage, and a list of materials provided by the mattress maker, Francesco Ricoveri. These documents are remarkably precise, even with measurements, and they would permit an accurate reconstruction of the staging of the opera in the room in the Palazzo Pitti originally intended for it, the current Sala delle Nicchie (although it was eventually done in a different space later known as the Sala delle Commedie). Cigoli’s contribution renders problematic conventional views of any shift from “Renaissance” to “Baroque” scenography. The three main issues concern the design of the proscenium, how to render a proper perspectival view, and the most effective way to make set changes (Euridice moves from a pastoral scene to an Underworld one and back), whether by way of rotating “periaktoi,” sliding flats, or canvases pulled up and down. Our digital reconstructions make clear how things worked for the opera from the point of view of the stage itself, and as to what the audience saw.