Abraham Bosse (c. 1604–76) was a well-known French printmaker and a zealous propagator of Desargues's perspectival technique, which basically was an elaboration of the linear perspective invented by Florentine painters of the fifteenth century. For a book of 1647 called The Universal Technique of M. Desargues, Bosse made an etching, untitled but commonly referred to as Les perspecteurs, in which we see an almost empty space with three well-dressed men placed at different distances and in different orientations. They seem to look for something to paint, since they are represented each with an “eye pyramid.” The top of the pyramid—Desargues called it “le rayonnement de la vue” (the radiation of the gaze)—is the point between the two eyes. That point is connected by straight lines to the four corners of the supposed visual field of the viewer. This pyramid is meant to help the artist to calculate the...

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