Abstract
The development of the modern theater building, begun in the Renaissance, corresponds not only to the technical needs of the performing arts but, and especially, to the prerogatives of the courtesan, and later bourgeois, life as a primordial ambience of sociability. Therefore, the lyric theater, as space, would be theme for painting from the eighteenth century on, time of definitive fixation of these buildings as symbols of magnificence and power. In the next century, the compliment of a cosmopolitan life style and the vicissitudes associated to this ambience would give the tone of the pictorial representation of the theater building.
keywords:
theater building; representation; magnificence; sociability; architecture; painting
