All’ombra dell’Apocalisse: Jean François Niceron e l’anamorfosi di San Giovanni Evangelista

The essay deals with a specialized field of research in the Baroque imaginary, that of anamorphosis, the perspective deformation technique of images known since the Fifteenth century, but perfected in its geometric rigor between the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. The interest in this aspect of the history of representation today emerges reinvigorated, if connected to the growing success that the deformations are enjoying in the media and design fields. And this essay is dedicated to the geometric-evolutionary analysis of a case-study considered paradigmatic and developed in the Roman context: the perspective accelerated image that portrays St. John the Evangelist on the island of Pathmos while writing the Apocalypse, delineated in 1639 by the Minim French Monk Jean François Niceron at the convent of the Santissima Trinità dei Monti on Colle Pincio, in Rome. In the sense proposed here, in addition to exercising the illusory power, typical of anamorphosis, in giving us access to hidden knowledge, this work shows how the projective logic of images began to form with ever increasing clarity in the Seventeenth century, just below the aegis of the notion of deformation, and of how this exegetical horizon was precociously understood by Girard Desargues (1591–1661) in his manière universelle in which perspective, gnomonics and strereotomy were all united under the single banner of projection.