La Perspective Affranchie Contenant la vraye et naturele pratique Jusques icy inconnue, et jugéé impossible...sans tracer ny supposer le plan geometral ordinaire

Only Edition of this perspective manual, written expressly to claim the one thousand franc prize offered in July 1657 by Girard Desargues (1591-1661), the great projective geometer, who dramatically advanced the study and practice of perspective. To meet the challenge, Bourgoing, an Augustinian friar, composed this work. His lengthy preface lays out his ideas and methods, concisely compares them point by point to Desargues', which prove inferior in every case. "The most important innovations in fact consisted in the new terminology...and in the...effort to eliminate the use of the geometric plane, which was achieved only many decades later by Taylor and Lambert" (Vagnetti, tr.).
            The main text deals with figures and shadow. Introductory schematic synopses frame the arguments of most sections, and the illustrations demonstrate the subject matter. Poudra praises the treatment of vanishing points. The absence of a devoted disciple or ardent enemy hampered the diffusion of Bourgoing's ideas, which remain little studied. He concludes this unusual folio with a poem addressed "To his Book - Travel the universe banishing all fear, / Neither the world nor hell can hinder you; / For the rashest attempts against you / Must lay down their arms before the truth (tr.).
            In his dedication to Cardinal Celio Piccolomini, Papal Nuncio to France, the Bourgoing places perspective at the head of all the arts. He next published a work of experimental science on vacuums (1664), principally an attack on Pascal's Traitez de l'équilibre des liqueurs (1663; Pascal espoused Desargues' teachings...). The final printed piece I have identified by the Bourgoing is a fugitive broadside on sundials (1671). In good condition (title-page worn and soiled with a small hole, scattered wax spots, narrow pale stain on three blank margins), bold signature of Debrugiere dated 1714 on the title, one Bonnemain signed the rear pastedown on an 18th-century April 16th, early 19th-century seven-line printed bookticket of Nantes bookseller J. Vatar on the blank title verso.
¶Vagnetti, De naturali et artificiali perspectiva - Bibliografia ragionata EIII.b54; Poudra, Histoire de la perspective 388-96; The First Proofs of the Universal Catalogue of Books on Art I: 153 ("1651", not seen).