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First edition, the Macclesfield copy, complete with its extremely rare supplement, of this polemic against Girard Desargues (1591-1661), "the greatest perspectivist and projective geometer of his generation" (Kemp, p. 120). The importance of Curabelle's work, a key text in the infamous 'perspective wars' of the 1640s, is that, in the process of attacking Desargues, he includes extracts from two of Desargues's lost works, on perspective and on gnomonics. "One of [Desargues's] first works to appear [in 1636] was a manual describing a new method for perspective construction . . . Desargues had long been promising to write a book on perspective. If Desargues really had a plan of a more comprehensive work on the subject than [his 1636 work], he never carried it out. He seems, however, to have produced a booklet that Jacques Curabelle referred to as 'Livret de perspective addressé aux théoriciens' [pp. 70-77 of the 'Examen'], claiming that it appeared it 1643. No copies of this booklet are known" (Andersen, pp. 428 & 437). In 1639, Desargues published his most important work, 'Brouillon projet d'une atteinte aux événemens des rencontres du Cone avec un Plan', a treatise on conics regarded as the birth of projective geometry. "In August 1640, Desargues published . . . an essay on techniques of stonecutting and gnomonics. While refining certain points of his method of perspective presented in 1636, he gives an example of a new graphical method . . . In attempting thus to improve the graphical procedures employed by many technicians, Desargues was in fact attacking an area of activity governed by the laws of the trade guilds; he also drew the open hostility of those who were attached to the old methods and felt they were being injured by his preference for theory rather than practice" (DSB). One of these technicians was Curabelle, who published in the present work a violent attack on Desargues's methods, "finding nothing in them but mediocrity, errors, plagiarism and information of no practical use" (ibid.). Desargues replied with a pamphlet defending his work, to which Curabelle responded with 'Foiblesse pitoyable'. In 'Oeuvres de Desargues' (II, p. 389), Poudra notes that the 'Foiblesse pitoyable' is bound at the end of the 'Examen' and, because of its rarity, transcribes it in full. Several of Desargues's original works are lost, and those which are extant are of extreme rarity, often surviving in just one or two copies, so that Curabelle's commentary on Desargues is the only information we have about some of the latter's works. ABPC/RBH records the sale of only one other copy (de Vitry), which was bound in "modern old-style panelled red morocco" (Sotheby's, 2002, lot 165, £5,287 = $7,630). Macclesfield 581 (this copy); Vagnetti EIIIb39. Andersen, The Geometry of an Art, 2007. Calvo-López, Stereotomy: Stone Construction and Geometry in Western Europe 1200 1900, 2020. Kemp, The Science of Art, 1990. Mersenne Corr. ix, 532; xi, 431; xiii, 104. For a detailed account of Desargues's work, see Field & Gray, The geometrical work of Girard Desargues, 1987. Two works in one vol., 4to. Examen: pp. [1-2], 3-81, [1, blank] with 16 engravings printed in the text (several full-page); Foiblesse: pp. 9, [1] with one engraving printed in the text (worming in the lower part of the gutter of the first five leaves of the 'Examen', nowhere near text). 18th century vellum-backed blue paper boards, manuscript lettering along spine (spine cracking and with minor loss). Seller Inventory # ABE-1624205018202
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