Perspective - Jean François Niceron

The man who influenced art history

Jean François Niceron was the genius of perspective - his work gave the world some of its greatest artworks

OK, pay attention at the back because here's a short lesson in perspective. Catoptrics is an area of study concerned with the properties of reflection and the formation of images by reflecting light off mirrors. Dioptrics is a branch of optics dealing with the refraction of light, especially by lenses. Anamorphosis is a distorted projection of an image which only becomes clear when the observer's point of view changes or it is viewed as a reflection produced by a specific curved mirror surface

Still with us? Give yourself a pat on the back. It gets easier from here because we're going to place you in the hands of the BibliOdyssey blog which has uncovered a bunch of 17th century images by Jean François Niceron, originally designed to help artists get to grips with the important issue of perspective. Niceron was a catholic friar, mathematician, and artist with a passion for investigating perspective. He was a native of Paris but travelled widely in Europe and was awarded a professorship in Rome. You can see and read about his work here and you can get just about the best overview of art that exists in book form here