Jean François Nicéron

482 pp. ACMRS (Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies) – To students and practitioners of anamorphic art, the name of Jean-François Niceron is more than preeminent; it has become iconic. La Perspective Curieuse was first published in 1638. An augmented version was then translated into Latin by Mersenne in 1646. A newly amended and augmented version was retranslated into French by Roberval in 1652. This book is an English translation of the 1652 text, with reference to the 1638 and 1646 versions.
Considering the continued high reputation of the book, the mathematics have been checked for correctness and consistency, and the authors have provided a full commentary, pointing out the most difficult turns of the 17th-century French, the respective contributions of Niceron, Mersenne and Roberval, and explaining Niceron's greatest insights and weaknesses.

Is what we see the ‘truth’? Can anamorphic imagery resolve the dichotomy between science and faith? In the 1640s Emmanuel Maignon, a French monk in residence at Trinitá dei Monti, the Minim Monastery in Rome, created an anamorphic wall painting of St John of Patmos in an upstairs gallery. This was about a hundred years after the controversial work of astronomers Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, and when Galileo Galilei, placed in house arrest by the Pope for presenting a heliocentric solar system that was not only heretical as it contradicted Holy Scripture but philosophically ‘foolish and absurd’, was nearing the end of his life. Studies of optics did not originate in the renaissance, as there were many advances between the ninth and fourteenth centuries when Euclidean theories were tested and advanced. In particular the Arab scholar, Alhazan, (985-1040) wrote about how optics influenced our understanding of the nature of reflection and refraction of light. In the 17th century, three men who were friends with one another, a Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), Minim friars Jean-Francois Niceron, (1613-1646) and Emanuel Maignan, (1601-1676) also devised proposals for catoptric and anamorphic projection, using developments optics and perspective to question divine light and perception in a merging of science and faith asking if we can rely on what we see, or if there is a hidden, perhaps heretical or even divine message hidden in the imagery. This paper examines some examples of anamorphosis, at Trinitá dei Monti painted by Maignon, at St Ignazio the Jesuit church in Rome painted by Andrea Pozzo (1691-1694) and of course Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors painted in 1533 and hanging in the National Gallery. It begins by questioning the philosophical meaning and concludes with a technical examination of how catoptrics and anamorphosis work, through a student workshop where we attempted to create an anamorphic image in the studio.

The essay is devoted to the artistic and perspectival work by Minim Father Jean François Niceron (1613-1646),
whose life was expressed in a very short period of time - just 33 years - but full of political and cultural events,
reflected in the works that at the eyes of a contemporary beholder appear as extraordinary charades, in the
balance between mathematical strictness and taste for the beauty and the fantastic.
Author of two treaties (the second of which, published posthumously) that have become milestones in studies
of seventeenth-century perspective - the Perspective curieuse (Paris 1638) and the Thaumaturgus opticus (Parsi
1646) - Niceron was fascinated throughout its existence from the idea that in nature is hidden a divine secret
code where the mathematics, and in primis the optics could be major interpreters, making an expressive vocabulary
that through the artificial magic could reproduce its hidden configurative nature, the laws of the making
and forming of its becoming.

482 pp. ACMRS (Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies) – To students and practitioners of anamorphic art, the name of Jean-François Niceron is more than preeminent; it has become iconic. La Perspective Curieuse was first published in 1638. An augmented version was then translated into Latin by Mersenne in 1646. A newly amended and augmented version was retranslated into French by Roberval in 1652. This book is an English translation of the 1652 text, with reference to the 1638 and 1646 versions.
Considering the continued high reputation of the book, the mathematics have been checked for correctness and consistency, and the authors have provided a full commentary, pointing out the most difficult turns of the 17th-century French, the respective contributions of Niceron, Mersenne and Roberval, and explaining Niceron's greatest insights and weaknesses.

This conference was a mid-time compte rendu of my research at Montrèal CCA-Canadian Centre for Architecture, established by Phillis Lambert and directed by Kurt Forster. I had a grant as a resident scholar for the program Baroque beyond Rome, for which I proposed as topic XVII century French architecture. I studied the subject for my PhD dissertation in History of Architecture at the IUAV

... The easiest solution would then be to simply provide disciplinary demar-cations—you worry about explicating natural phenomena and we'll worry about complicating the endless meta-physical aporias that encompass such phenomena. ...

"Jean François Niceron. Prospettiva, catottrica & magia artificiale"
mostra a cura di
Agostino De Rosa
& Imago rerum

in collaborazione con
Ambassade de France près le Saint-Siège, Roma
Le Pieux Etablissements de la France a Rome et a Lorette, Roma
Ordine dei Minimi di San Francesco di Paola, Roma

22 aprile > 31 maggio 2013
Spazio espositivo “Gino Valle”
Università Iuav di Venezia
Dorsoduro 2196, 30123 Venezia

Conferenza (su invito) dal titolo "Passi nell’infinito: le opere dei Padri Emmanuel Maignan e Jean François Niceron a Trinità dei Monti, Roma", presso il Politecnico di Milano, in seno corso Corso di "Rilievo e Rappresentazione dell'architettura" (prof. Andrea Donelli) e al
"Laboratorio di Restauro" (prof.Gianfranco Pertot), aula C.E.3. edificio n.7, Milano 8-05-2014.