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Framing the Miraculous: The Devotional Functions of Perspective in Italian Renaissance Tabernacle Design

This article considers the devotional functions of perspective in Italian fifteenth-century tabernacle design, asking why the perspectival backdrop became such a ubiquitous motif, especially in tabernacles designed to house the Eucharist, relics or miracle-working images. It maintains that the principal function of perspective was not an attempt to represent the natural world but rather a means of revealing the heavenly one; and it identifies five devotional functions associated with perspective, namely, focusing devotion, revealing the hidden, enhancing the size of the holy, distancing the heavenly and radiating holiness. These functions, so the article shows, were to have an impact beyond the world of liturgical furnishings and go on to influence perspective use in large-scale architecture as is shown through the analysis of two works by Donato Bramante, S. Maria presso San Satiro, and his celebrated Tempietto. This study will lead scholars to look at perspective afresh and it will almost certainly lead to new insights in both painting and architecture in the Renaissance.