Abraham Bosse. La verdad contra la ignorancia

Abstract

To commemorate the fourth centennial of the birth of engraver and lecturer on perspective Abraham Bosse (1602-1676), the article describes the most important contributions made by 17th century France to perspective procedures, in the historical context of the Academies and Classicism, where there are two opposite postures which are still discussed today: Art understood as a continuation of inherited traditions, against the rationalisation of artistic production based on objective principles (in this case Perspective). The biography of A. Bosse, full of controversies and vicissitudes, and the most important work of his master Gerard Desargues (1593-1661), help to present the main contributions that the perspective procedure proposed by Desargues in «The Universal Manner» published in 1636, introduces in the representation of space where, for the first time, empirical procedures used in the workshop are replaced by a geometric-mathematical system using the notion of the infinite and perspective scales. The text is completed with the transcription of the document which Abraham Bosse presented in 1660 to the members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture of France («Notebook followed by an engraving given by A. Bosse and a letter to the members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, containing evidence of the duplications, disfigurations and falsifications of the perspective style of M. Desargues plagiarised by J. Le Bicheur»), as the last resort for his own and his master’s defense before being expelled from the academy, in which he describes the vicissitudes of a dispute which lasted for over thirty years, defends the authenticity of his work and demands the acknowledgement that only posterity has awarded him.