Altho the Italians had discovered perspective early in the Renascence they utilized it on the stage timidly at first, bestowing this rectangular regularity upon all their sets, both architectural interiors or exteriors and rural scenes, in which rigid wood-wings receded, diminishing in height to a landscape painted on the drop at the back, thus leaving the whole stage free for the actors. Not until the end of the seventeenth century did an Italian scene-painter, Bibiena, venture to abandon the balanced symmetry of the square set, and to slant his perspective so as to present buildings at an acute angle, thereby not only gaining a pleasing variety, but also enlarging immensely the apparent spaciousness of the scene, since he was able to carry the eyes of the spectator into vague distances, and to suggest far more than he was able to display. This advance was accompanied by a more liberal use of stairways and platforms--"practicables" as the stage-phrase is--that is to say, built up by the carpenters so that the actors could go from one level to another. Hitherto flights of steps and balconies had been only painted, not being intended for actual use by the performers. [Illustration: The set for the opera of 'Persée' (as performed at the Opéra in Paris in the seventeenth century)] [Illustration: A prison (designed by Bibiena in Italy in the eighteenth century)] A similar development took place also in the landscape scenes; the foreground was raised irregularly, so that the persons of the play might climb up. Practicable bridges were swung across torrents, and the earlier formality of pastoral scenes began to disappear. Apparently the scene-painters were influenced at this time by the landscape-painters, more especially by Poussin. The interrelation of painting and scene-painting, each in turn affecting the other, is far closer than most historians of art have perceived. It is not unlikely, for example, that Gainsborough and Constable, who were the fathers of the Barbizon men, had been stimulated by the stage-pictures of De Lutherbourg. David Garrick profited by the innovating art of De Lutherbourg, a pupil of Vanloo, who came to England in 1771. Apparently it was De Lutherbourg who invented "raking-pieces"--as the scene-painters term the low fragments of scenery which mask the inclines of mounds. To him also is credited the first use of transparent scenes to reproduce the effect of moonlight upon water, and to suggest the flames of volcanoes. Thus to him must be ascribed the beginnings of that complicated realism by which our latter-day scene-painters are enabled to create an appropriate atmosphere for poetic episodes. IV