Touching and ‘Feeling’ the Feast of Herod by Benozzo Gozzoli: A Multisensory Communication Strategy Unveiling the Secrets of Painted Spaces to the Blind

The paper presents the first results of a research pertaining the communication of painted spaces to visually impaired people, particularly referring to Renaissance paintings in which perspective dictates the arrangement of space, time, narration and composition. In order to make such paintings understandable and knowable by blind visitors, it is first necessary to translate them into a tactile, three-dimensional form. The research hypotheses have been applied to a case-study, i.e. The Feast of Herod and the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist by Florentine painter Benozzo Gozzoli, which is characterized by sequential temporal moments coexisting in the same scene. The pictorial subject also provides a number of very interesting inputs which make it well suitable for the research, not only for the role of perspective and its unifying power, but also for a multisensory communication of its content. The inverse method of linear perspective has been exploited to reveal the plans and sections corresponding to the perspectival space painted by Gozzoli, from which it was possible to build a three-dimensional model of the scene. However, a tactile transposition of the painting alone is not enough; it must be supported by an educational model and a multisensory experience which takes into account the needs of a visually impaired audience and benefits everyone by adding ‘feeling’ to the visual experience.