Students wishing to pursue the subject into its more extended branches will find, I believe, Cloquet’s treatise the best hitherto published.[Footnote 2] ]
[Footnote 1: ] Some irregularities of arrangement have been admitted merely for the sake of convenient reference; the eighth problem, for instance, ought to have been given as a case of the seventh, but is separately enunciated on account of its importance.
Several constructions, which ought to have been given as problems, are on the contrary given as corollaries, in order to keep the more directly connected problems in closer sequence; thus the construction of rectangles and polygons in vertical planes would appear by the [Table of Contents] to have been omitted, being given in the [corollary to Problem IX].] [Return to text]
[Footnote 2: ] Nouveau Traité Élémentaire de Perspective. Bachelier, 1823.] [Return to text]
[p1]
]THE
ELEMENTS OF PERSPECTIVE.
INTRODUCTION.
When you begin to read this book, sit down very near the window, and shut the window. I hope the view out of it is pretty; but, whatever the view may be, we shall find enough in it for an illustration of the first principles of perspective (or, literally, of “looking through”).
Every pane of your window may be considered, if you choose, as a glass picture; and what you see through it, as painted on its surface.
And if, holding your head still, you extend your hand to the glass, you may, with a brush full of any thick color, trace, roughly, the lines of the landscape on the glass.