Lot 569: COUSIN, JEAN (?1490-1560).

Livre de perspective. Paris: Jehan le Royer, 1560

Condition Note:

folio (373 x 265mm.), ff. [72], illustration : woodcut device on title-page, woodcut frontispiece, woodcut initials, head- and tailpieces, woodcut diagrams (5 folding), binding : seventeenth-century calf, title-page foxed and chipped, frontispiece cropped and repaired, G3 torn, a few diagrams shaved, other occasional light browning, joints splitting, binding worn

IA 146.154; Mortimer, Harvard French 157; Berlin Catalogue 4690; Cicognara 832

first edition. The painter Jean Cousin was an important theorist in the field of perspective who perfected the tiers points technique (in which the eye is led away from two points close to the viewer to the distant third or vanishing point).

This book was the first to be printed by Le Royer, the king's printer for mathematics, who cut most of the woodcuts himself from the designs by Cousin.