The Origin of Shadows and Directions of Vanishing Points

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

 Shadows must come from somewhere, and it is that "somewhere" that this beautifully-titled chapter addresses.

In another unusually-titled piece, we find a "shadow-maker" embedded within  patented "cloud creator", as so

this taken from the 25 May 1892 patent granted to Steele MacKaye, though his apparatus was only for generating special effects for the theatre.  Still, the title of the patent was pretty catchy, as was the "shadow-maker" part, which is evidently the only time that phrase is used in U.S. patents through 1900. 

It is from P.Le Dubreuil's  La Perspective pratique, printed in Paris inn 1642 and  translated by E.Chambers for another edition in 1730.  It was--according to Lawrence Wright, in his Perspective in Perspective) the primary consulted work for practical perspective through the rest of the century, replaced by the great Andrea Pozzo's Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum in 1693. It is simply a lovely work.
 

Another wonderfully titled chapter--or at least lovely when used in conjunction with the above--occurs in Ernest Norling's (1892 -1974) Perspective Drawing (the full text located here.).  Norling was leading element of the New Deal Mural Projects

In any event, I just wanted to post these odd bits before I lost them, again.