The Achivement of the Fourth Wall: Evolution of the architectural Stage Front in the Renaissance Theater

Abstract

One of the conquest of the recreation of the theater’s model in the XVI Century, was the proposition to eliminate the ‘scaenae frons’ as it was known in the classical Antiquity. The time for dematerialization begins at the end of Renaissance, under the influence of the spatial representation’s theories, at the same time that happens the recover of the permanent classical theater and the vitruvius reinterpretention of the scene as a wall with doorways as an archade or a triunfal arc. The Olimpic Theater is a paradigmatic example of this, the initial phase of a process which, within the run of the 19th Century, leads to the final disappearance of the stage front and the formalization of what we know as ‘the fourth wall’.