Before photography, a host of optical devices enhanced the human eye to see more, to see better and farther that resulted in representing the world in new ways. Along with related literature and ephemera, the GRI holds several early-modern instruments that were precursors to photography’s invention in 1839, and that laid the foundation for our current entanglement with the many facets of photographic media.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treatises on perspective, such as Vignola’s Le dve regole della prospettiva pratica (1611), describe small boxes painted on the inside with illegible images, known as anamorphoses, which come into focus when viewed through a peephole. Groundbreaking for their time, scientific explorations into optics and perspective were often presented by way of popular entertainment, as shown in La perspective pratique (1647-51) by Jean Dubreuil, a Parisian Jesuit, which illustrates a series of rooms outfitted with large-scale anamorphoses enjoyed by well-dressed courtesans, not unlike video galleries of the 20th century.
Among the collection of optical devices, there is a rare eighteenth-century camera obscura which collapses in the form of a leather-bound book, stamped on the spine with the title: Théâtre de l’univers. When this “book” is opened on a sunny day and the concealed lens and mirror properly set up, miniature reflections of the proximate world and its inhabitants move silently across the stage of the book’s back cover. Other instruments in the collection range from a solar microscope, enabling a flea to be enlarged on a wall for a room full of spectators, to a camera lucida, for outlining figures while drawing, and to a miniature mirrored box or “perpetual gallery” that multiplies a reflection into infinity. For an overview of optical devices and their context in the early modern to contemporary periods, see Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2001; and for a list of the GRI holdings on this subject see here.
Image: Unknown creator. Optical Device. Ca. 1840. Getty Research Institute, 93.R.118.