- La rappresentazione urbana dalla prospettiva "catoptica" alla prima fotografia aerea

Already, in 1504, Pomponio Gaurico in his essay De Sculptura, suggests the use of the Katoptike perspective, (which looks downwards) to represent «a crowded scene, battles, fighting, cities and similar, which can not be rendered unless seen from above». From this, you can form the basis of that type of representation that we today define " bird's- eye view" which in the dawnings of the eighteenth century, through this sensitive experience with the hot air balloon invention, can we claim has been achieved. This essay, attempts to pin point an enquiry of such experience, through reading the images of the eighteenth century city in which the flying instrument becomes the standing point - real or fictitious for the representation of the urban implant, representation which up until now could only have been obtained through a complex geometrical construction, and so complex and articulated which often force the artists to abandon it, in order to leave space for the imagination or where it was possible, namely in the presence of other towers or hills and mountains to drawing from the real. The excursus" starts from an extraordinary invention of Panorama of Robert Barker and proceeds with splendid views of the city taken from the air balloon like the incredible Vue gènèrale de Paris prise dell'Observatoire, en ballon in 1855 by Victor Navlet, up until the series à vold'Olseau of Alfred Guesdon and to the consequent connection with the aerial photograph. Precisely, this last one offers new and interesting scenes for the study of urban representation, beginning from the study of material achieved from the pioneers of this arte like Charles Clifford and Nadar.