Andrea Mantegna's Wedding Chamber: An Early Renaissance Immersive Masterpiece Rendered as a Modern Extended-Reality Installation

Abstract

The Wedding Chamber fresco, also known as Camera Picta, or La Camera Degli Sposi, painted by Andrea Mantegna at the dawn of the Renaissance, epitomizes the most outstanding expression of personal creativity and innovation from an artist that transformed the boundaries of representation and narrative inside the architectural space, to mix illusion and reality. He utilized the trompe l'oeil effect, the Oculus, and cinematic painted imaging on the walls, to reveal a world of fictional and symbolic situations combined with classical mythology. However, Andrea Mantegna playfully organized these compositional components, inaugurating a proto-technological system of visualization that transforms the viewer's perception in an immersive experience that goes beyond the mere effect of illusion. The research and the development of the installation described and explained with deconstruction of what Mantegna expressed masterfully at the end of the 15th century in the Saint Giorgio Castle in Mantua, Italy.