What is Oval

The content of this chapter comes from a wider research, investigating a controversial architectural treatise titled “Architectura Civil Recta y Obliqua”. It was written in the late XVII century by the polygraph and mathematician Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz, and it is often mentioned by historians in relation with the cultural debate around an illustrious project: Bernini's Vatican colonnade. However, the theoretical apparatus behind the “invention” of oblique architecture - certainly the most original part of the treatise - is more complex, and it is thought to sink its roots in the rising Science of Representation. The book has been subject of a renewed academic interest in the recent past. Nevertheless, a systematic study that efficiently related the treatise, the complex personality of its author and the scientific and cultural background of XVII century is still missing.