perspective scenery, in theatre, scenery and the scene design technique that represents three-dimensional space on a flat surface, creating an illusion of reality and an impression of distance. Developed during the Italian Renaissance, perspective scenery applied the newly mastered science of linear perspective and brought the craft of illusion to the Italian stage. An initial motivation may have been to allow theatre to move from outdoors into closed rooms, where perspective painting could make small spaces appear larger.

Influenced by the perspective painting of Renaissance artists and by the 15th-century revival of Vitruvius’ writings on architecture, Baldassarre Peruzzi applied the laws of perspective to scene design. His work provided a basis for his student Sebastiano Serlio’s De architettura (1545), which outlined methods of constructing perspective scenery and the raked stage—whence the terms upstage and downstage derive. In Serlio’s designs, painted scenery receded directly from the viewer toward a single vanishing point at the back of the stage. Angle perspective was an 18th-century refinement of perspective scenery. Several vanishing points were set at the centre-back of the stage and off to the sides, so that the scenery, receding in several directions, was pictured at an angle to the viewer.