Seventeenth-century controversies about the representation of the sun's shadow. The manuscript Artes excelençias de la Perspectiba in context

Abstract

The anonymous but extremely interesting treatise Artes excelençias de la Perspectiba, dated 1688 and dedicated to "maestro P. Gómez de Alcuña", focuses on perspective in the seventeenth century in Spain and Europe.1 The four-book document contains ninety-six sheets. The first two books are dedicated to the geometric fundamentals of perspective and its use in architectural representation.2 The fourth book, inserted in the binding after the second, focuses on regular and star polyhedra.3 The incomplete third book, in which some texts are missing, is dedicated to the study of the projections of shadows and perspectives on walls and ceilings. Since the treatise remained a manuscript, it never circulated in contemporary artistic and scientific milieus.4 The manuscript is an excursus on the most popular Italian treatises on perspective in seventeenth-century Spain, for example the ones by Vignola-Danti (Le due regole della prospettiva pratica, 1583),.