tive during the Italian Renaissance appeared as the turning point from the vertical space of medieval universalistic culture to the horizontal space of the individual exploration of the world, beginning with Panofsky's essays up to their post-Lacanian revisions undertaken by Damisch, Holm, and Elkins.1 But the emphasis on the triumph of perspective, as a characteristic feature of the transition from the medieval to a new age, sometimes forced the historical data. I intend to prove in my essay that the introduction of perspective to the theater of the cinquecento has often been described and interpreted according to a nineteenth century gaze that imposes its own perspective on the historical data, forcing them to conform to an abstract and crystallized conception of the Renaissance. At the root of this contemporary gaze lies the conception that the Renaissance artistic culture was wholly classicizing in its outlook, as if the historical category of Renaissance and the stylistic one of classicism were overlapping. The celebrated essay devoted to the "anti-Renaissance" by Eugenio Battisti, and recently republished in Italy, rests on this very premise.2 Contesting Burkhardt's celebration of the Renaissance culture, Battisti's book focuses on the anticlassical, irrational, fantastic, and magic data celebrating the existence of a "marginal" culture during the Renaissance. By cataloguing this data under the rubric