Subject: Cupola del Collegio Romano
Author: Andrea Pozzo
Source: Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum
Date: c. 1693–1698

The dome does not exist — except from one point.

These plates disclose the mechanism behind the illusion.
The circular engraving reconstructs the painted architecture as if it were real; the adjacent diagram reduces it to its perspectival armature.

What appears in the church as spatial continuity is, in fact, geometric compression.
A hemispherical volume is projected onto a flat surface and recalibrated to coincide with a single, privileged viewpoint.

This is not decoration.
It is fictional architecture acting upon the real one — spatial fiction engineered through mathematics.

The drawing does not represent the dome.
It makes it exist.
It constructs the conditions under which belief becomes possible.