Silmilar interests inform Abraham Bosse’s Manière universelle de
Mr. Desargues pour pratiquer la Perspective par petit-pied, comme le geo-
metral(Paris, 1648), popularizing the geometrical studies of his teacher,
Girard Desargues (1591–1661). In the initiating image, disembodied hands
hold strings that lead to squares in an illustration of the geometric aspect of
the visual pyramid. [Figure 32] Bosse transposes the disembodied hand
with the seeing eye, depicted on the next page. [Figure 33] Like the drawing
hand, the seeing eye selects the lines that frame its view.
Partaking in contemporary discussions of perspectivalism, Desargues’
essays of 1636 and 1639 aimed to solve the problem of drawing in per-
spective without any peripheral pieces of paper to establish the sightlines
laterally beyond the picture plane.^24 This would liberate the observer from
a single point, as determined by Alberti. Desargues thus delocalizes the
gaze, initiating a geometrical model projecting infinite spatial geometry
rather than thefinite one recognized in the surveyor’s geometry used by
previous theorists of perspective. His mathematical proof was identical to
one central to ibn al-Haytham’s argument describing the infinity of geo-
metrical space.^25 This created a variable subject position of viewing similar
to the displacement of the subject by the polyhedral isometric geometry
common in Islamic surface treatments.
In contrast to thefixityoftheRenaissancegazeunderscoredinDürer’s
images, Bosse roots the perspectival gaze in multiplicity, unmooring its sub-
jectivity. Yet this was precisely danger that Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716)
identified in the plurality of perspectives made possible through his identifica-
tion of the“monad”asthemodelforthedisembodiedsubject.Hebasedthis
on Descartes’framework of sensory deprivation enabling his famous proof,“I
think, therefore I am.”In contrast to ibn Sina’s association of oneiric truth as
enabled by sensory deprivation, Descartes made sensory deprivation the
unrealistic premise for wakeful reason (seeChapter 7.2). Building on this
internalized, desensitized notion of self, Leibniz envisioned monads as indi-
viduated atoms, which had“no windows through which to come and go,”
thereby becoming self-determined. They became aggregate under a higher
monad, vested with a soul, which places the monads into harmony. Leibniz
uses the conceit of an overarching perspective achieved by God, the‘single
universe,’to solve the problem of multiple perspectives.“Just like a city
considered from different vantage points looks different every time, seemingly
multiplied by perspective; likewise it so happens that an infinite multitude of
simple substances will produce many distinct universes, which are nothing but
(^24) Taton,2008. (^25) Catastini,2016.
Perspectives on Perspective 313