88 HURET, Grégoire. Optique de portraiture et peinture, en deux parties. Paris: chez l’autheur, 1670 the mathematics of perspective First edition, with an appealing near-contemporary French provenance: with the bookplate and ownership inscription of Hieronimus (Jérôme) Beausire. The Beausires were a famous French architectural dynasty – our Beausire may be Jérôme (1708– 1761), architect and son of Jean Beausire, chief of public works in Paris under the Sun King and Louis XV. “The draughtsman and engraver Grégoire Huret (1610–1670) – an academician who was also close to the king – took over Bosse’s lectures at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In 1670, Huret published Optique de portraiture et peinture ( Optics of portraying and painting ) in which he expressed great concern about the state of the art, particularly criticising Bosse’s book from 1665 [ On the practices of geometrical planes and perspectives ] and previous publications . . . Huret claimed that his book should be seen as a contribution to the education of the young, especially to teaching them useful rules for drawing perspective . . . Huret was well read and discussed books on other subjects than perspective. Naturally enough these included general works on painting, but also Desargues’s and Pascal’s works on projective geometry . . . Among the more productive passages in Huret’s book one can find a presentation of the construction and use of an angle scale. He also dealt with a point most authors avoided, namely the use of scaled lengths in perspective constructions. In this connection he presented the technique for applying a reduced distance in a distance point construction – without reducing the actual distance – that ’sGravesande applied later” (Andersen, pp. 465–66). Folio (373 × 253 mm). Contemporary mottled calf skilfully repaired, red speckled edges. Engraved allegorical plate by Huret, 8 folding diagrammatic plates. A very good copy. ¶ Kirsti Andersen, The Geometry of an Art: the History of the Mathematical Theory of Perspective from Alberti to Monge , 2007. £5,000 [96431]
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