Abraham Bosse and the perspective in practice

Between the Renaissance and Baroque, perspective is a privileged form of representation of reality. While mathematical speculation contributed to making perspective an exact science, it was widely practiced in different forms of artistic expression. The problems linked to the operational practice concerned all its applications in a transversal way, from scenography and anamorphoses to the illusory perspective. Methods of constructing perspective traces are generally described in the treatises on practical perspective in a fragmentary way. Abraham Bosse is the author of a volume published in 1653, entitled Moyen universel de pratiquer la perspective sur les tableaux ou surfaces irrégulières, entirely dedicated to the method for reproducing perspective traces on architectural surfaces. In Bosse’s work, the problem of perspective construction is addressed according to the levels of increasing complexity in which the picture plane, starting from its flat or generically inclined configuration, assumes a completely irregular morphology. The proposed procedure is universal and resolves the question through the method of perspective Arguesian scales, without using inaccessible “vanishing points”. Bosse imagines the construction of perspective on the vertical walls, considered infinitely extended, of the room to be painted, overlapping it with a regular grid. Then, he imagines projecting this grid from the same projection center onto any picture plane. The operational practice makes use of the construction of a picture plane that we can define ‘auxiliary’, reproduced by the ropes used in the construction and projected on the surfaces to be painted.