Sight, Knowledge, Variety, and Correction: Kasijan Sakovyč’s Perspektywa and Related Book Titles

Summary The article is devoted to a category of titles of books in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout the Baroque age. Besides more traditional titles containing words related to the sense of sight meaning mirror and image, in the seventeenth century we find titles with the word perspective (in Polish: perspektywa). While the presence of ‘mirror’ (zwierciadło) and ‘image’ (wizerunk/wizerunek) in Old Polish titles has already been studied, less attention has been devoted to ‘perspective’ in this position. Starting from the polemic treatise published by Kasijan Sakovyč in 1642, we searched for other works containing perspektywa in their title in the Baroque period. We presented and described all the works we could find, which are not numerous. On the basis of the classification proposed by Anna Kochan and Michał Kuran, we tried to determine the relation between perspektywa on one side and zwierciadło and wizerunek on the other. We had to consider the progressive semantic enlargement of the meaning of the word perspektywa. In the sixteenth century, it had already become a designation for a new artistic device and in the following century it had become the name for the telescope. It was then a term tightly related to the sense of sight. We argue that its meaning overlapped both with zwierciadło and with wizerunek but with a greater emphasis on the fact that the account given was full and varied. The term perspektywa was polysemic and in titles it could preserve its ambiguity. This triggered the creation of various metaphors. We examined the case-study of Kasijan Sakovyč’s treatise, which we had started with. The polysemy of the word perspektywa contained in its title was exploited at large by the authors of books written as a refutation to it. The use of perspektywa along with zwierciadło and wizerunek is another symptom of the perduring centrality of sight in Baroque culture in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as elsewhere in Europe.