Santa Maria Novella (1981-82)

Megyik’s inspiration for this work came from the Italian Renaissance basilica of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. He built an early wood construction point by point from a floor plan of the church. This photogram is a photographic “impression” of that construction.

Leon Battista Alberti, who designed the facade of Santa Maria Novella in the late 15th century, helped codify two-point perspective as a system for depicting three-dimensional space on a flat surface, in art and architecture alike. Megyik is especially interested in “projective geometry”—the application of perspective to building. He admires its rigor but understands it as a necessarily incomplete system that happily leaves much room for the imagination.