Welcome	About	Introduction	Chapter One beginning of time – 999 AD
Chapter Two 1000 AD – 1399	Chapter Three 1400 – 1599	Chapter Four 1600 – 1649	Chapter Five 1650 – 1699
Chapter Six 1700 – 1749	Chapter Seven 1750 – 1799	Chapter Eight 1800 – 1819	Chapter Nine 1820 – 1829
Chapter Ten 1830 – 1839	Chapter Eleven 1840 – 1849	Chapter Twelve 1850 – 1859	Chapter Thirteen 1860 – 1869
Chapter Fourteen 1870 – 1879	Chapter Fifteen 1880 – 1884	Chapter Sixteen 1885 – 1889	Chapter Seventeen 1890 – 1894
Chapter Eighteen 1895 – 1899	Chapter Nineteen 1900 + post cinema	Chapter Twenty 1911 +	Copyright
HOTDOC Internet Archive Channel	HOTDOC X Channel	HOTDOC You Tube Channel

_{Period: 1400 to 1599}

We left off in chapter two learning about Arnold of Villanova, a magician and showman who used the Camera Obscura Room to present moving shows or cinema by placing his audiences in the darkened room and would have the actors perform outside. 

The image of the performance would be cast on the inside wall. Villeneuve would often enact wars, or hunting scenes with animals, his actors and all the associated noises heard by the patrons from inside of the room as they watched the wall cinema.

We continue now during Medieval times and by the time we conclude this chapter we will have entered the Early Modern Era at 1593. First, let’s begin with some pre Phantasmagoria. Enjoy.

1404-1438
THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT ANIMATIONS
WILFRED MICHAEL AND ETHEL VOYNICH
This book rediscovered in 1912 is thought to have been created in the 34 years commencing in 1404, placing its completion at 1438. A mysterious and misunderstood codex, except for the animations.

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Called the Voynich Manuscript since it’s rediscovery in 1912, this book was purchased by the Voynich’s from a trunk of old works once owned by our very own Magic Lantern proponent, Athanasius Kircher.

_{All animations created by Patrick Feaster}

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As the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University Library states, the Voynich Manuscript is a “Scientific or magical text in an unidentified language, in cipher, apparently based on Roman minuscule characters.” These four pages are from the BRBML at Yale.

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In my early years of study in the 1990s, other historians had referred to this as a Camera Obscura. Since then, I have seen this referred to correctly as a lantern. This Magic Lantern illustration of Fontana’s is from over two hundred years before Kircher’s ‘Ars Magna’  lantern in the 1640s, and even Drebbel’s, which was earlier than that.

Fontana’s imagery is key in media archaeology because his female-devil-lantern is the first documented conceptual link between firelight; a confined box; a projected moving or still image; and theatrical or emotional effect (fear, awe, deception).

In this drawing by Fontana, we see the image within the held object. The subject is clearly shown as female, projected onto the wall.

One aspect of this devilish character is interesting because the lantern very early became an instrument to instill fear in its viewers, therefore the choice of the devilish female character.

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As Bennett Gilbert, an instructor in interdisciplinary philosophy and history at Portland State University tells us;

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One aspect of the devilish character is interesting: the lantern very early became an instrument to instill fear in its viewers. Something demonic. Something horrific. People could not understand how this could be. They immediately considered it to be sorcery.

With no understanding of optical and natural phenomenon, it was immediately written off as devilish. And beyond that, those that dared venture into a venue to see such things, were scared out of their seats. In the middle ages those who took part or were putting on these shows may have been excommunicated or even put to death.

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LEFT
Redolent of the Moisse Fantascope found by Thomas Weynants in 1991, dated to 1820, is this Phantasmagoria skeleton coming out of his sarcophagus by Johannes De Fontana in his work known as Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber in 1420.

RIGHT
The Moisse Fantascope Skeleton Illusion uncovered by Weynants 400 years after Fontana. Did Molteni, the maker of the Moisse Fantascope Skeleton Illusion in 1820, know of Fontana’s Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber in 1420?

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I believe this drawing of Fontana’s is the same as referenced by Siegfried Zielinski in his piece on Cinema Archaeology when he states regarding the Magic Lantern…….

“One of the earliest, around 1420, had a particularly striking feature: the diabolical element was very definitely imagined as feminine. The projectionist, who held the lantern with a taper in his hand, wore oriental clothes (possibly a reference to the original inventors of the magic lantern). The drawing of the lantern was not exact; the apparatus is depicted around the image . . . . ..” 

^{(Siegfried Zielinski, Media Archaeology, #5, A companion piece ).}
Siegfried Zielinski BIO

_{Johannes de Fontana sketches of his Magic Lantern from 1420 (Thanks to Loek Raemakers, Rotterdam).}

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the lantern very early became an instrument to instill fear in its viewers

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If we’re to believe the advertising motto “give them what they want,” we’ll have to also believe that in 1420, Fontana gave his patrons what they wanted in the way of a farting rabbit on a skateboard.

I kid you not.

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SEE a single static image from Fontana’s Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber while you LISTEN to an audio biographical sketch of his work. Some pauses exist. The Magic Lantern image is mentioned at 2:42. The rabbit at 2:46. Runs 4:50

1425
FILLIPO BRUNELLESCHI (1377–1446)
Brunelleschi developed a Perspective Viewer (top right) providing a 3D image and incredible depth. Film composition and Cinematographic framing came as a result of Fillipo’s work. One-point perspective used by Kubrick is a perfect example.

Perugino’s (1481–1482), The Delivery of the Keys, his fresco from 1481, in the Sistine Chapel, featuring Brunelleschi’s linear perspective is pictured directly below.

Fillipo Brunelleschi and his magnificent dome for the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral in Florence, and his Perspective Viewer from 1425 which aided in the dome’s construction.

It wasn’t until the 14th century that linear perspective began to be used by artists successfully, allowing them to transform a two-dimensional surface into a realistic representation of our three-dimensional world. This is true in all forms of art including cinematography.

Linear perspective is used by artists to create the illusion of depth and space. To achieve this effect, there are three essential components needed in creating a painting, theatrical or cinematic composition;

🎞️ Orthogonals (parallel lines)
🎞️ Vanishing point
🎞️ Horizontal line

Adding depth and space to a 2D surface appealed to Renaissance painters of the 15th century who valued new techniques. Some of the best-known Renaissance artists were also masters of linear perspective, some embracing the three cameras. Gustave Caillebotte’s Le pont de l’ Europe, 1876.

LINEAR PERSPECTIVE: BRUNELLESCHI’S EXPERIMENT
SEE Filippo Brunelleschi’s experiment regarding linear perspective in 1425, in front of the Baptistry in Florence. Created and hosted by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker with some jazzy music.

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Let’s have a look now at how the Fillipo Brunelleschi discovery or re-discovery and understanding of perspective, line and linear perspective, and composition has now been applied to cinematography. Some of our great directors and directors of photography are mentioned. Let’s bring it all forward about 495 years.

ATMOSPHERIC PERSPECTIVE
Like linear perspective, atmospheric perspective creates the illusion of depth on a 2D surface. Instead of lines and points, atmospheric perspective primarily uses colour. The Exorcist (1973), no better example by William Friedkin and Owen Roizman.

Apocalypse Now Kubrick, (1979) Atmospheric Perspective.

Alien Ridley Scott, (1979) Linear Perspective.

Saving Private Ryan Steven Spielberg, DP Janusz Kaminski, (1998) Linear Perspective.

CENTRAL COMPOSITION
As the name suggests, the main subject is placed in the middle of the frame. Most novice photographers will compose their shots this way by default, especially if they haven’t learned to shoot with intent. Gravity Alfonso Cuarón, DP Emmanuel Lubezki, (2013) Central Composition.

Memories of Murder Bong Joon-ho, (2003) Central Composition using a tunnel. How many times have you seen a tunnel in a movie.

Linear Perspective embracing Central Composition. You will look at that line of sinks as much as you look at the main character. The Last Laugh (F. W. Murnau, 1924).

Linear Perspective. Not only did Griffith use the actresses but look at the stone lions, the lines in the steps horizontally in shadow and the different tones in the steps as they go up. Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916).

The Tree of Life Terrence Malick, Emmanuel Lubezki, (2011) Central Composition.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis from 1927. This film is full of perspective. In almost every shot.

I have always found two-point perspective incredibly personal. You feel like you’re right there with Julie experiencing her fear and phobia. The Haunting, Robert Wise, DP Davis Boulton (1963).

1435
LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI (1404-1472)
Alberti is credited with inventing an instrument he called the ‘intersector’ and nicknamed his ‘veil’ in his 1435 treatise on painting, De pictura (On Painting), which was a precursor to his later architectural work.

The intersector was a simple device, essentially a gridded screen or window, that artists could look through to help them accurately transfer a three-dimensional scene onto a two-dimensional surface. This was a crucial development in the understanding and application of linear perspective, which had a profound impact on Renaissance art.

Vasari, in Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects regarding Alberti said; “Leon Battista made a discovery for representing landscapes and for diminishing and enlarging figures by means of an instrument, all good inventions useful to art.”

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The instrument Vasari was speaking of is actually Alberti’s Intersector, a cousin to the Camera Lucida, and not a Camera Obscura. Alberti describes his technique and purpose for using the Intersector in his treatise On Painting. The image directly above is Alberti’s visual pyramid and Intersector in an engraving by Abraham Bosse, 1648.

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Here below in three separate images, is what is known as Alberti’s Veil from his work De pictura treatise on painting, composed in 1435, but published in 1450. A “perspective window device,” it aided in composition by adding a grid to the picture plane and a stylus to the station point, permitting a rationally proportioned view when completed.

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1452
MEDIEVAL OPTICS and TELESCOPIC MIRRORS
THE LOST KNOWLEDGE OF TELE MIRRORS & VISORS IN THE MIDDLE AGES
What are Telemirrors or Visors, and do they exist today? Were they lenses like in a telescope? Or Binoculars? What were Telemirrors?

Ever since I stumbled upon Telemirrors as they’re referred to, I have been intrigued. Dr Benjamin B. Olshin is a former Professor of Philosophy, the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and Design, at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

An article he wrote on the Epistemology of Ancient Lost Technology is what piqued my interest.

As he stated, “In some early texts concerning long-distance viewing, the term ‘mirror’ is used, but not as a device for simple reflection. Instead, the mirror takes on other powers, and the term seems to serve as some kind of metaphor for a fantastical device to view scenes remotely.”

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The Gesta Romanorum or, Deeds of the Romans is an assembly of narratives dating from c. 1452 written to provide scruples about ethics and morality. Each anecdote denotes a certain moral characteristic.

Today we would call this virtue-signalling.

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The narrative shifts to the device: “Then, the stranger said, putting into his hand a polished mirror,look attentively upon this, and you will see wonders.” He asked the knight, “What see you?” and the knight observed, “I see, a certain clerk in my house.”

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Many instances of the recurrent Telemirroring pattern are found in many sources involving technical gadgets. The idea of using an optical device to watch at a distance is actually a trope appearing in a number of early stories.

The Arabian Nights: One Thousand and One Nights is another one.

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READ
TALES FROM THE GESTA ROMANORUM, by Anonymous
Translator: Rev. Charles Swan

Titled: The Knight and The Necromancer 1844
At Project Gutenberg.

OR

Titled: Of The Transgressions and Wounds of The Soul 1905
At Internet Archive.

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CONCLUSION
The term Telemirror may be a modern or fictional construct, possibly inspired by Ausonio’s work on mirrors or confused with later optical instruments like telescopes.

Ausonio’s studies were theoretical and focused on mirror optics, not long-distance observation tools. His work laid groundwork for later optical innovations, such as those by Giovanni Battista della Porta, who extended similar principles to convex lenses.

The idea of a Telemirror stems from a misinterpretation of ancient signaling methods (e.g., using polished shields to reflect sunlight) or a fictional narrative linking Ausonio’s optical work anachronistically.

For instance, Caesar’s actual reconnaissance of Britain relied on scouts, merchant interviews, and direct observation, as detailed in Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Book IV), with no mention of mirrors or optical devices.

And as for Cardano, he was influenced by contemporaries like Ettore Ausonio, whose work on concave spherical mirrors addressed image formation and focal points. Cardano’s claim about seeing distant objects perhaps refers to theoretical setups involving mirrors to reflect light from faraway scenes, possibly exaggerating the practical capabilities of 16^th century mirror technology.

While concave mirrors could focus light or create magnified images under specific conditions, the idea of seeing detailed activities “five miles away” was speculative and beyond the technological limits of his era.

1470
MEDIEVAL FLIP BOOK
LUDWIG HENFFLIN’S CODEX SIGENOT
The Codex Palatini Germanicus 67 was written in 1470 by Ludwig Henfflin who flourished in the 15th century. The manuscript was commissioned by Margarethe von Savoyen better known as Margaret of Savoy (1420-1479), for the Codices Palatini Germanici.

BACKGROUND ON THIS FLIP BOOK OF THE MIDDLE AGES
There is something magical about this 106-page illuminated manuscript which begs the question: was the concept of the Flip Book or image motion sequence considered back in the 15th century? It would seem so.

The Codex Palatinus Germanicus 67 is a late medieval manuscript from the former Bibliotheca Palatina in Heidelberg Germany. It belongs to the Codices Palatini Germanici, the German-language manuscripts of the Palatina, kept in the Heidelberg University Library since 1816.

It has a distinct appearance to that of the 19th century Flip Book and if taken apart and made into an animation I wonder what we would see.

THE SCENARIO OF SIGENOT
A film treatment for Sigenot if written, would read like a script that morphs into a Marvel Studios or DC comics super hero storyboard come to life from 554 years ago. 

The Sigenot chronicle goes something like this;

Scholar Hans Wegener discovered Nº 67 in 1927 and has stated the coloured drawings were “carefully, but very temperamental and unimaginative.” However, upon a closer inspection a revelation takes place, like what we saw with the discovery of the Burnt City Bowl.

The illustrator whoever he was, designed cycles of illustration in his depictions of the story. He often uses a now-modern animation trick that we today call simultaneous illustrations – that is, the successive use of the same oft-needed and repetitious images such as backgrounds, common today especially in anime. I mean, why redraw it if you’re going to use it often?

Would Walt Disney have approved?

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“when you fan through the drawings quickly, it presents as a late 1800s Flip Book”

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The Codex Germanicus 67 manuscript restoration began in 1962 by Hans Heiland’s Stuttgart workshop. All the leaves suffered from severe decay on the green-coloured passages in the miniatures (images). The restoration has been miraculous for something 544 years old.

Have a look.

On 101 of the 106 leaves there is an illustration on the recto and verso, in the upper half of each, i.e., every single stanza of the story was illustrated. And when you fan through the drawings quickly, it presents as a late 1800s Flip Book.

Modern digitisation helps.

Sigenot has sequential illustrations with short intervals between different phases of action. Each page has a picture inside a frame above the text, with consistency of size and position throughout and, a consistent difference in size for the recto and verso of each leaf.

It’s as if Ludwig Henfflin wanted us to see this work the way we are right now.

From this workshop, several German-language illuminated texts have come down to us in the manuscript collection of the Codices Palatini Germanici (the former Electoral Palatinate Bibliotheca Palatina), all of which are stored in the Heidelberg University Library.

Amazing to look though this manuscript 554 years of age, and watch a movie with intertitles right below the picture.

Real pre cinema history.

_{All still images Heidelberg University Library.}

1485
LIVE WIRELESS STREAMING
“If the front of a building or some piazza or field which is illuminated by the sun has a dwelling opposite to it, and if in the front which does not face the sun you make a small round hole all the illuminated objects will transmit their images through this hole and will be visible inside the dwelling on the opposite wall which should be made white.”

“Nothing can be seen that does not transmit its image through the air.”

-The notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. 108. pp233, 238, 1485+

1485
BOTTICELLI’S MOTION PAINTINGS?
ALESSANDRO DI MARIANO FILIPEPI (1445-1510)
Was the early Italian Renaissance artist Botticelli our first Motion Picture painter? It appears he may have been, if he painted the Venus Sequence that is. This entry was inspired by a colleague in the field.

Sandro Botticelli painted his Birth of Venus in 1485. Setting it aside to dry, did this Master of the Renaissance begin to paint others? Did he paint a sequential movement of Venus from canvas to canvas? Remember the name William Hogarth.

Botticelli had both the means and desire to be our first Motion Picture painter. Did he give us Birth of Venus – The Director’s Cut in 1485? He may have wanted to see real movement in art – his art. In his mind he may have seen what is titled “Motion Paintings.”

These images named Motion Paintings of Birth of Venus could be coined by modern art critiques as the Venus Sequence.

Like early animated pictures, an arm is slightly moved and a picture snapped. Rinse and repeat 1000X and you have Lotte Reiniger’s Prince Achmed (1926).

If Botticelli’s sequential canvasses existed, we have only these three images. Venus appears beginning what could be a dance, or some kind of funny gesture based on her face and mouth in the third painting pictured above. Perhaps she’s happy to have been born in a clam shell.

We do not know if there were other sequenced paintings of Venus.

Were there, other paintings of Venus?

For a man who perhaps wanted to see motion in his own art, three frames just wouldn’t cut it.

When these three sequenced paintings we have acquired are animated at a third of a second rate (1/3 of a second), they give only a glimpse of what Botticelli may have wanted to achieve.

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His Codex Atlanticus'(Vinci, Leonardo, Ambrosian Library, Milan, Italy, Recto A of Folio 337), and Manuscript D (Manuscript D, Vinci, Leonardo, Institut de France, Paris, Folio 8) both give detailed accounts of the Camera Obscura effect, observations, diagrams and explanations of it’s principle.

In writing on the eye, Vinci incorporates the Camera Obscura effect seen through the pinhole. He marvels at how the entire universe could go through such a tiny hole. He writes;

“O marvellous, O stupendous necessity, thou with supreme reason compellest [sic] all effects to be the direct result of their causes; and by a supreme and irrevocable law every natural action obeys thee by the shortest possible process. Who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of all the universe? O mighty process! What talent can avail to penetrate a nature such as these? What tongue will it be that can unfold so great a wonder? Verily none! This it is that guides the human discourse to the considering of divine things. Here the forms, here the colours, here all the images of every part of the universe are contracted to a point. What point is so marvellous? O wonderful, O stupendous necessity—by thy law thou constrainest [sic] every effect to be the direct result of its cause by the shortest path. These are miracles…forms already lost, mingled together in so small a space it can recreate and recompense by expansion. Describe in thy anatomy what proportion there is between diameters of all the lenses in the eye and the distance from these to the crystalline lens.”

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The 18-page Codex Leicester (Codex Hammer) is just one of 30 scientific manuscripts da Vinci authored. Many consider it the most important. In 1994 Bill Gates paid $30 Million for it and had the pages scanned for a screensaver in Windows 95.

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“who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of all the universe?”

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Remember the Windows 95 Plus Leonardo Da Vinci Codex Leicester Screensaver?

Approximately one hundred and forty years prior to Kircher’s lantern, Leonardo gave us this drawing below of a lantern showing clearly a condensing lens, candle and chimney. 

Perhaps the most well-known optical illustration from the hand of da Vinci, page 34 from Codex Atlanticus under the heading Tools and Machines, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.

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 VIEW Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus for yourself and see each and every page as Leonardo left it when finished in 1490, at Ambrosian Library, Milan.

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1515
LEONARDO DI SER PIERO DA VINCI (1452-1519)
Vinci wrote a manuscript Treatise on Painting covering various principles within optics. It will be published in Milan in 1589 and later in Paris in 1651.

None of Leonardo’s writings indicate any hint of him actually projecting images, however this illustration from the master strongly suggests a figure of some type between the candle and lens.

Directly below is da Vinci’s Sighting Grid found in Codex Atlanticus, a 12-volume set of bound original drawings made by Leonardo between 1478 and his death in 1519. On the Sighting Grid and it’s use, da Vinci said;

“Have a piece of glass as large as a half sheet of royal folio paper and set thus firmly in front of your eyes, that is, between your eye and the thing you want to draw. Then place yourself at a distance of 2/3 of a braccia [arm’s length] from the glass fixing your head with a machine in such a way that you cannot move it at all. Then shut or entirely cover one eye and with a brush or red chalk draw upon the glass that which you see beyond it; then trace it on paper from the glass, afterwards transfer it onto good paper, and paint it if you like, carefully attending to the aerial perspective.”

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he marvels at how the entire universe could go through such a tiny hole

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A complete list of digitally scanned Leonardo illustrations can be found at Biblioteca Leonardiana | Digital Archive of History of Technology and Science, affectionately known as e-Leo.

1515
ALBRECHT DURER (1471-1528)
This German superstar artist of his time made woodcuts of drawing aids, one of which was his own. They were published in Underweysung, 1525.

Below a self portrait age twenty-six, and a page from Underweysung showing Durer’s Sighting Tube for accurately drawing perspective.

In this case, a lute.

Durer’s Sighting Tube was vital to proper perspective and a precursor to the coming Camera Lucida of Wollaston.

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Pictured directly below is Albrecht Durer’s etching of Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman in 1525.

^{The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.}

Its design was driven by an intricate system of pulleys, cables, gears, and gears, with two independent mechanisms: a four-degree-of-freedom system in the chest for controlling the arms, shoulders, elbows, and wrists, and a three-degree-of-freedom external crank and cable system for the legs, hips, knees, and ankles.

This reflected Leonardo’s deep understanding of human anatomy, gained through dissections, which he applied to mimic natural motion in machinery.

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In 2002, robotics expert Mark Rosheim built a functional prototype based on these sketches, demonstrating the knight’s ability to walk and wave. Below, the knight and its inner workings recreated based on his drawings.

This knight automaton has been reconstructed beginning in 2007 and is now part of the exhibitions of the Leonardo3 Museum.

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Another da Vinci creation was a lion presented to King Francis I of France in 1515 that could walk on its own. @L3_Leonardo3. In 2007, Mario Taddei, technical director at the Leonardo3 (L3) research centre and museum in Milan, led a reconstruction effort.

Taddei’s team identified additional sketches in the Codex Atlanticus, enabling a more accurate replica. Their version, built in the Leonardo3 laboratories, was fully operational and showcased Leonardo’s innovative use of pulleys and worm gears to achieve lifelike movements.

The reconstruction highlighted the knight’s potential military applications, as researchers speculated it could have been envisioned for fortress defense, though its primary use was theatrical for the Milan pageant.

Created around 1515 for King Francis I of France, during a celebration in Lyon or Milan, this automaton was designed to impress the French court. According to historical accounts, the lion could walk forward, move its head, eyes, and tail, and, in a dramatic flourish, open its chest to reveal a compartment filled with lilies, symbolizing the French monarchy.

In 2009, the lion was recreated from Leonardo’s surviving drawings. While no complete original survives, the automaton performed as intended, given Leonardo’s reputation and the detailed nature of his sketches.

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Here is a video of one of the recreated lions made from the drawings Leonardo left us.

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1521 
FRANCISCUS MAUROLYCUS (1494 – 1575)
A Jesuit priest, Maurolycus finishes his Theoremata De Lumine Et Umbra Ad Perspectivam (1611, Naples, 1613, Leyden) explaining how to build a microscope and in proposition 20 of the book writes,“an object’s shadow can be converted and projected.”

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Maurolycus also studied and made references to rainbows and how light refraction affected them. This astronomer and mathematician wrote in his De Subtilitate, on light, theatres, and light theatres. He names Da Vinci, Albertus Magnus and Pliny in this work.

Photismi and Diaphana dealt with light refraction and attempt to explain the natural occurrence of the rainbow. Maurolycus also deliberated on the Camera Obscura.

1521
CAESARE DI LORENZO CAESARIANO (1483 – 1543)
Caesariano is best remembered as the Milanese architect and commentator on Vitruvius (Di Lucio Vitruvio Pollione de architectura, Como, 1521). In that edition, which is the first printed Italian translation and commentary, he includes numerous woodcuts illustrating architectural and optical principles. 

Caesariano also speaks of the Camera Obscura, and is found in Vitruvius’s Treatise on Architecture 1521. In his commentary on De architectura Book I and Book V, Caesariano discusses vision, perspective, and the properties of light passing through small openings.

The entry speaks of a cone-shaped hole in the wall and a large image on the opposite wall. This entry is translated in 1521 but is in fact referencing Vitruvius’s description of a Pinhole Image which I think was likely written between 30 and 15 BC.

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His 1521 edition contains passages where he explains how rays of light cross at the aperture, resulting in inversion which is very close to how the Camera Obscura was always described.

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Caesariano was a student under Vinci and describes this passage detailing an experiment by a Benedictine monk, named Benedettino Don Papnutio, or Paunce. A concave glass screen is also mentioned being placed in the hole of the wall in a darkened room.

Caesariano includes a fascinating anecdote (Book I, Leaf 23 verso) about this “natural camera system,” attributed to the Benedictine monk.

He “made a little sighting tube” and fitted it into a door panel so that no light entered the room except through that small aperture. Through it, outside objects appeared “with their own colors, in what really was a natural camera system,” and “the images were upside down,” just as in a camera without a lens (Quigley p35).

Caesariano wrote; 

“Cut a circular concavity about two inches in diametre in a piece of wood about four or six inches in size, then place in the centre of the concavity a small and very short tube [spectaculum] or aperture, which is also called a sight. If you fix this properly in a panel of a door or in a window shutter, closed so that no light can enter, and if you have a piece of white paper or other material upon which [the images of] everything passing through the aperture may be received, you will see everything on the earth and in the sky with their colours and forms, according to the conical shape [piramide] of the hole.” 

-This quote taken directly from the work of Helmut Gernsheim, The History of the Camera Obscura From the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in the Eleventh Century Up To 1914, p4,5.

Like the style of Leonardo Da Vinci, Papnutio gives exact dimensions in his account of the Camera Obscura. Unfortunately, Caesariano does not give dates of the experiment. Thirty years later, Porta will speak of the camera in astonishingly similar terms and claims for his own, the idea of using lenses under the pretense of “secrets.”

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Even the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica credits Cesariano’s Vitruvius as the earliest published account of the Camera Obscura phenomenon. An Italian summary from Irene Campana, Pinhole Photography: History and Evolution of a Technique, (Thesis in Pinhole Photography. Stoma And Evolution of a Technique, University of Bologna, 2003-2004) captures the technical detail translated as:

This account predates Girolamo Cardano’s 1550 description using a glass disk to project upside-down images by several decades. Likewise, Giambattista della Porta’s better-known 1558 Camera Obscura description appears some 37 years later. And, although Leonardo da Vinci described this effect much earlier in 1502, his writings weren’t published until the late 18th century, so they were not widely known at Caesariano’s time.

1523
LORENZO LOTTO (1480-1556)
Lorenzo Lotto was a significant painter of the Venetian Renaissance, though his greatness is often debated due to his idiosyncratic style and uneven recognition during his lifetime. His work is characterized by emotional intensity, psychological depth, and innovative use of colour and composition, which set him apart from contemporaries.

Another Camera Obscura user as cited by David Hockney (Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, 2001) could have been this painter of the Venetian school.

The Camera Obscura was known in the Renaissance, primarily for scientific and observational purposes, as described by figures like Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks (c. 1500). However, its use by artists remains speculative and debated, especially for someone like Lotto.

Lotto’s paintings, with their detailed textures and expressive compositions, don’t show clear hallmarks of Camera Obscura use, such as the precise perspective or slightly blurred edges often associated with the device in later artists like Vermeer. Hockney disagrees.

While Hockney’s theory includes artists of Lotto’s era, it lacks specific references to Lotto himself. Without concrete evidence—like sketches, letters, or technical analysis of his paintings showing optical distortions—it’s reasonable to assume Lotto likely relied on his observational skills and training.

Hockney brings our attention to Lotto’s Husband and Wife, painted in 1523. Hockney realized that the rug pattern goes out of focus in the painting. Something that would only be painted if having been seen through a lens. A point that has been made by many critics about many pieces of art.

THE CAMERA IN EARLY ART
Recent studies provide intriguing but not conclusive evidence about Lorenzo Lotto’s potential use of a Camera Obscura. A primary source I found is a 2018 analysis from the University of Arizona’s optics department, which examined Lotto’s Husband and Wife (1523).

The study highlights the distorted octagonal pattern on a table covering, reproduced with 2% accuracy, suggesting the use of a lens-based projection that was refocused twice (they think) to adjust for depth of field. The changes in magnification align with geometrical optics principles, with a precision (±0.2%) deemed unlikely to occur by chance.

This implies Lotto may have used an optical device, possibly a Camera Obscura with a lens, to achieve such accuracy in complex perspective. One source states the painting was made in 1543.

_{Husband and Wife, Lorenzo Lotto, (c. 1523)}

DOUBT DOUBT DOUBT
However, this evidence is debated. Art historians like those cited in Artland Magazine (2020) note that while David Hockney and Charles Falco argue Lotto and contemporaries like Jan van Eyck used optical tools for realistic effects, direct proof remains elusive (they say).

The detailed realism in Lotto’s work, such as the psychological depth in Portrait of Andrea Odoni (1527), could stem from his keen observational skills and Venetian training under masters like Giovanni Bellini, rather than mechanical aids.

Infrared studies of other artists, like Canaletto whom I have also highlighted, show pencil under-drawings that suggest manual plotting rather than tracing from projections, casting doubt on widespread Camera Obscura use.

Additionally, the practical challenges of using a Camera Obscura in the 16th century—such as dim images and inversion issues with small lenses (for example 4cm spectacle lenses)—suggest it was not a straightforward tool for artists like Lotto, unlike later artists like Vermeer who had access to improved optics.

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Lotto’s nomadic career across Venice, Bergamo, and the Marches, often in less urban settings, also suggests limited access to sophisticated optical devices, which were more common in scientific or courtly circles.

No surviving documents, such as Lotto’s detailed account book called Libro di spese diverse, (1538–1556), mention optical tools, unlike Leonardo da Vinci’s explicit references to the Camera Obscura in his Codex Atlanticus (1502).

_{Portrait of Andrea Odoni, Lorenzo Lotto, 1527, in the Royal Collection, Hampton Court}

In conclusion, while there’s compelling evidence suggesting Lotto could have used a Camera Obscura for specific effects in paintings like Husband and Wife, the lack of direct documentation and the challenges of 16^th century optics lean toward him primarily using his exceptional observational and artistic skills.

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Unlike the forthcoming Chromatrope or Mechanical Magic Lantern Slides, the Volvelle was made of varying strengths and types of paper. SEE a working Volvelle here of an Indonesian Puppet.

Volvelles were the predecessor of the Dissolving View as this one shows one warrior dissolving into another warrior. Henry Langdon Childe gave us the Dissolving View of which I will share more on in the coming chapters.

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the Volvelle, and the Moving Book are both the predecessors of your smartphone apps and are hundreds of years old in origin

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It was not until the 18th century that these devices of movable printed works like pop-up or, moving books appeared in children’s literature. This video below is from Tina Kraus, an “illustrator and paper engineer.”

She calls it Circus Zingaro: A Pop-Up Book.

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The polymath and Camera Obscura user Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz will be one of Ramon Llull’s many fans in the centuries to come. Moving Books, Revolving Disks and Volvelles are a fascinating part of pre cinema. More on Leibniz to come.

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THE MECHANICAL ALGORITHM OF TRUTH: RAMON LLULL’S VOLVELLES AND THE DAWN OF COMPUTATIONAL THOUGHT
The Medieval Vision of a Thinking Machine
Often remembered for his Volvelles, Moving Books, and Revolving Disks—tangible, interactive devices—Llull’s true legacy lies in his Ars Combinatoria or Art of Combination.

This system was a pioneering attempt to mechanize logic and externalize human reasoning through a series of geometric figures and paper-based instruments. Llull’s work represents a profound intellectual paradox: an invention intended to prove theological truths that ultimately laid the foundation for a secular, algorithmic approach to knowledge.

THE MAN, THE MISSION, AND THE METHOD
Ramon Llull (c. 1232–1316) was born in Palma de Mallorca, an island that had recently been conquered and was a cosmopolitan centre of western Mediterranean trade and culture. His birthplace was a unique environment, with a significant Arab population and a large Jewish community, which would profoundly influence his life’s work.

Initially, Llull led an indulgent life as a troubadour, composing songs and engaging in a life of “womanizing and trivialities.”

Though from an affluent family, he considered himself illiterate in Latin, the scholarly language of the time, suggesting he did not receive a formal university education. His lack of a formal Scholastic education liberated him from the rigid, traditional philosophical frameworks of the day, allowing him to create a unique and idiosyncratic system that would not have emerged from conventional academic circles.

The Mechanical Manifestation: Volvelles, Disks, and Diagrams
The abstract principles of Llull’s Art of Combination were given a tangible form in a series of innovative physical devices, which are commonly referred to as volvelles, revolving disks, or moving books. The most precise term is volvelle, derived from the Latin verb volvere, meaning to turn.

These were interactive diagrams integrated directly into manuscripts and, later, printed books, transforming the static page into a dynamic “vehicle for learning and knowledge creation.”

The construction of these devices was simple yet revolutionary. They were typically made of concentric circles of paper or parchment, held together at the centre by a tie or fastener. This central pivot allowed the disks to be rotated independently of one another, enabling the user to align different concepts and generate new combinations.

The fragility of these paper-based instruments is evident in the surviving examples; many are incomplete, and their delicate fasteners, such as a tie or sewn button, are susceptible to wear and tear.

Llull is credited with introducing the volvelle to the West in the late thirteenth century. The devices are most famously associated with his philosophical works, such as the Ars brevis, where a volvelle was used to combine the letters of his symbolic alphabet to help readers contemplate fundamental questions of faith.

Beyond theology, Llull also applied this technology to other fields, creating a volvelle known as “The Night Sphere,” which used the position of stars to calculate time and determine the optimal moment to administer medicine.

The Lullian Algorithm: How the Devices Operated
Llull’s method, the Ars Combinatoria, was a pioneering attempt to create a “mechanical algorithm of truth,” a system that could generate knowledge through a systematic, step-by-step procedure. The process was a form of “computational thinking” where the rotation of the disks was akin to executing a logical operation.

By arranging the letters of the Lullian alphabet on the concentric disks, users could manually rotate them to generate a vast number of combinations. Each combination of letters was designed to represent a new statement or to pose a profound philosophical or theological question.

The system was intended to serve as a comprehensive “theological reference” from which a reader could find the correct answer to a question by turning to the appropriate combination.

This intricate process was far from a simple, “turnkey system.” Mastering the Art of Combination required months of dedicated study to understand the definitions, rules, and procedures for generating and interpreting the letter combinations.

Llull’s ultimate goal was for the Art of Combination to serve as a powerful tool for rational debate. The system was thus a multifaceted instrument, simultaneously serving as a debating tool, a mnemonic device for “artificial memory,” and a mechanism for generating new knowledge from a fixed set of fundamental ideas.

The utopian vision Llull held for this machine, hoping it could end theological disagreements and even war, speaks to the revolutionary and messianic nature of his intellectual project.

LEGACY AND ENDURING RELEVANCE
A Precursor in Context: The Influence of the Zairja
The intellectual foundations of Llull’s Ars did not emerge in a vacuum. It is widely accepted that his work was significantly inspired by the medieval Arab zairja, a mechanical device used by astrologers to “generate ideas by mechanical means.”

The zairja used the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet to represent different philosophical categories, and by combining their values, it could create new paths of insight and thought.

The Seeds of Modernity: From Llull to Leibniz and Beyond
Llull’s work, though largely overlooked for centuries, planted the seeds for modern formal logic and computation. His Ars Combinatoria found new life in the work of Renaissance thinkers like Giordano Bruno and Athanasius Kircher.

However, his most direct and profound influence was on the 17^th century philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, of whom I have a series on.

Leibniz, in his dissertation De Arte Combinatoria (1666), acknowledged Llull’s ideas but took them in a radically new direction. While he reportedly “had little regard for Lull’s work in general,” Leibniz recognized the immense potential of a universal combinatorial algebra.

He envisioned a system that could represent all knowledge with symbols, a “universal algebra” that would enable philosophical disputes to be resolved as simply as a calculation. His famous quote, “Let us calculate,” encapsulates this vision of a world where rational discourse is mechanized and automated, a concept directly inspired by Llull’s work.

A Visionary Beyond His Time
Ramon Llull was a figure of extraordinary vision. The volvelles and revolving disks he invented were not mere curiosities but the tangible manifestation of his Ars Combinatoria, a logical engine designed to externalize and automate human thought.

Llull’s ultimate significance, therefore, lies not in the answers his machine provided but in the revolutionary question it posed: Could human knowledge and truth be systematized and, one day, calculated? In this, he remains a true visionary—a medieval mystic who, by accident and design, laid the groundwork for the age of algorithms and artificial intelligence, as well as being a precursor of animation.

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When the infirm Charles V abdicated his throne in 1555 and retired to the monastery at San Yuste, Torriano accompanied him and documentation states;

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The Smithsonian preserves a working creation attributed to Torriano—the fifteen-inch high Praying Monk. The wood and iron automaton walks, beats its chest, turns its head, and rolls its eyes, and murmurs silent prayers with it’s lips.

This video is fascinating, and shows in detail, this Praying Monk, made over 494 years ago. It runs four minutes and ten seconds.

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As the National Museum of American History tells us regarding this automaton;

“This automaton of a friar can imitate a walking man thanks to a wind-up mechanism. The friar’s eyes move from side to side, while one arm raises a rosary’s cross for an automated kiss and the other arm strikes the chest in the “mea culpa” gesture from the Catholic Latin Mass.” 

“The automaton and other mechanical figures, precursors to today’s robots, are in the collections of the Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American History.”

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1535-1543 
FRANCISCUS MAUROLYCUS (1494-1575)
Maurolycus was a Sicilian professor of mathematics at Messina. He made references to observing eclipses without harming the eyes by using a Camera Obscura in his Cosmographia, (Maurolycus, Venice, Italy, 1543).

He offers a solution to the age-old optical phenomenon of why, regardless of the shape of the aperture, does the image of the sun always appear round or crescent-shaped during an eclipse.

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why, regardless of the shape of the aperture, does the image of the sun always appear round or crescent-shaped during an eclipse?

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In the fourth century BC, Aristotle had asked;

“Why is it that when the sun passes through quadri-laterals, as for instance in wickerwork, it does not produce a figure rectangular in shape but circular?”

Aristotle went on to expand on his problem, frustrated. He died not knowing that it would eventually be explained and given the name diffraction.

“Why is it that an eclipse of the sun, if one looks at it through a sieve or through leaves, such as a plane-tree or other broadleaved tree, or if one joins the fingers of one hand over the fingers of the other, the rays are crescent-shaped where they reach the earth?”

Aristotle couldn’t come up with a satisfactory explanation to his “moon sickle” question. The problem remained unexplained for close to two thousand years. An optical physicist at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Vince Huegele, provides a modern explanation;

“Solar images formed by pinholes, crossed fingers, patches between leaves, all occur because of diffraction–a wave property of light. In the case of a pinhole, the light rays do not shoot straight by the rim of the hole, but bend around the edge. This wave effect creates a diffraction pattern of rings on the screen which resembles a bull’s eye. That’s for a flat wave single light source. If the aperture is illuminated by a scene, it acts as a lens to image the scene on a screen. With the right size hole relative to the right distance to a screen, a clear image is formed. That’s the general principle of a pinhole camera.”

“Applying this to an eclipse observation, the sun becomes the object to view. Point the pinhole camera at the sun and you see a solar image (projected on a screen) dim enough your eyes can enjoy.”

“But the pinhole effect doesn’t need a designed aperture. The solar image can be formed by any aperture if the shadow is the right distance away. The sun’s rays though tree leaves work to make a solar image on the ground below. Blinds on the window will covert a square opening into a round sun on the wall.”

“The marvel is that diffraction doesn’t need a round hole to form an image. A square pinhole will also work if its area is the same. Even for a random edged shape, the wave bending will average out to form an image of the scene contained in the incident light. That’s why the spots of light through the trees are round; the gaps in the foliage are imaging the sun. “

“Due to the geometry of the sun as an object, it can form an image with a small mirror just as if it was a pinhole. Find a small mirror (like one from a makeup compact) or make one using a mask to create a 1″ diameter hole over a mirror. Reflect the sun onto a shadowed wall of a building for the same effect as a pinhole camera. Back away from the wall until the spot is round and you have reached the right distance for diffraction to occur, which may be 700 times the size of the mirror aperture. Now make a mask with square or irregular shaped hole about the same size and shine it on the wall. The spot will be round because it is the image of the sun and not a shadow of the mirror. And during an eclipse, it’s a crescent.”

– Vince Huegele, optical physicist at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Centre

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Cellini, a multifaceted Renaissance artist known for works like his Perseus with the Head of Medusa, claimed to have staged a grand nighttime spectacle at the Colosseum. In his autobiography, he describes using a device to project images, involving lenses, mirrors, and a light source of some kind not defined—elements that prefigure the Magic Lantern.

The show reportedly featured vivid, possibly eerie or supernatural imagery, such as demons or fantastical figures, designed to astonish and terrify the audience. Cellini’s flair for drama and his reputation as a showman suggest this was a theatrical performance meant to showcase his ingenuity and artistic prowess.

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Cellini’s expertise as a goldsmith and sculptor, working with precise tools and materials, would have given him the technical skill to experiment with lenses or mirrors.

The projected images could have been hand-painted transparencies, possibly depicting mythological or diabolical figures, which fit the Renaissance fascination with the supernatural and the macabre.

On this supposed event, the writer Samuel Higley wrote in the June 1876 edition of The Magic Lantern (regarding the work of Kircher but referring to Cellini) this fascinating description of “smoke and shadow;”

“There is every probability that this was the crude kind of optical arrangement employed by the Sicilian priest whose incantations in the Colosseum at Rome are so graphically described by the celebrated Florentine engraver, Benvenuto Cellini. This necromantic ceremony, he states, lasted above an hour and a half, whereat legions of fiends seemed to fill that vast Amphitheatre. Cellini seems to have had some knowledge of how these demons were “raised,” as he says that he tried to quell the intense fear and horror of his companions by telling them that “all these demons are under us, and what ye see is but smoke and shadow,” thus indicating an optical origin for such frightful visions. A declaration made by a youth who accompanied Cellini on this occasion further confirms the conviction that some kind of magic lantern was employed, for the boy states: “As we are going home to our houses in the Quarter Branchi, two of the demons whome we had seen at the Amphitheatre went on before us and leaping and skipping, sometimes running upon the roofs of the houses, and sometimes upon the ground.”  

 – Samuel Higley, The Magic Lantern, June 1876, Vol. II, No. 6)

I have also read that Sir David Brewster quoted this event but there was no source or quote.

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THE PHANTASMAGORIA BEFORE THE PHANTASMAGORIA
The Colosseum, already a ruin by the 16th century, was an evocative setting. Its vast, open structure would have provided a dramatic backdrop for projections, with flickering light casting images on walls or screens.

Cellini’s account emphasizes the emotional impact on the audience, who were reportedly awestruck, highlighting the event’s blend of art, technology, and spectacle.

Below, a scene taken from the Berlioz’s opera Benvenuto Cellini depicting the Roscoe report on the Phantasmagoria-type dressed stage at the Coliseum (or Amphitheatre), Rome in

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what ye see is but smoke and shadow, thus indicating an optical origin for such frightful visions

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Public spectacles—feasts, processions, and theatrical displays—were common in Renaissance Italy, and optical illusions were increasingly popular. For example, artists and scientists like Leonardo da Vinci had explored Camera Obscura effects, and Cellini’s contemporary, Giovanni Battista della Porta, later wrote about optical devices in his Magia Naturalis (1558).

Cellini’s Colosseum event fits into this tradition of blending art, science, and showmanship to captivate audiences.

Here from Life of Benvenuto Cellini translated by John Addington Symonds, 1899, in the Introduction section on page xxv, we read the account of the fantastical show at the Colosseum, here at Internet Archive, paying specific attention to pages xlii, 171, 172, 173 and 174.

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While Cellini doesn’t provide a technical blueprint, historians believe his device was an early optical projector, perhaps using a light source such as candles or oil lamps, painted glass slides, and a convex lens to project images.

This setup if accurate, aligns with the principles of the Camera Obscura, known well in Europe since the Middle Ages, and anticipates the Magic Lantern, which became an extremely popular entertainment device in the 1600s. Christiaan Huygens is often credited with refining the Magic Lantern around 1659, but Cellini’s performance suggests Renaissance artists were already exploring optical projections.

This is a view below of how the Colosseum (known then as the Amphitheatre) in Rome looked, by the French-born Dutch artist Jan Gossaert (1478-1532) c. 1509.

Imagine seeing a Phantasmagoria show in this venue, at night, in those days.

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Pictured is a plaque commemorating Benvenuto Cellini at the Palazzo del Banco di Santo Spirito.

Cellini’s autobiography in my opinion is famously self-aggrandizing, and some historians I have seen, approach his claims with skepticism. The exact nature of his device and the scale of the projections remain unclear, as no physical evidence or detailed sketches survive.

It’s possible the effects were more rudimentary than later Magic Lanterns, relying heavily on the Colosseum’s atmosphere to amplify their impact. Additionally, the event’s date (around 1540) is approximate, based on Cellini’s timeline in his memoir.

Reinhold was a key figure in promoting Nicolaus Copernicus’ heliocentric model, which proposed that the Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun. He  made observations of solar eclipses using a Pinhole camera, and explained how to use the camera to view the eclipse.

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Directly below on the left is the frontispiece from Theoricae Novae Planetarum of Georg Pauerbach, of which Reinhold made reference to, in speaking of using a Pinhole Camera to view a solar eclipse.

On the right, two pages with Pauerbach’s illustration and description from the book, of the Pinhole effect on p30.

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This well-known illustration is from the hand of Gemma-Frisius in 1544 and is believed to be the initial illustrated account of the Camera Obscura being used regarding a solar eclipse and the protection of the eyes. From Gemma Frisius’ 1545 book De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica.

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1533
ONLY THROUGH A LENS
HANS HOLBEIN (c. 1497-1543)
Only through a lens could Hans Holbein the Younger have seen, and then painted, a human skull at the bottom of his 1533 The Ambassadors in the elongated shape he did.

This is a striking painting from our past and begs the question when first seen, what is that at the bottom. 

Over a hundred years before Vermeer and two hundred before Canaletto we find the Camera Obscura used in art.

The elongated skull is created from a rarely used optical effect in the early days of film. It’s called anamorphosis and it’s even rarer in the Renaissance and Mannerism periods.

In 1533 only the Camera Obscura lens would have provided this view to an artist, the way it did.

Using a graphics program, painter and historian David Hockney has squeezed or compressed the distorted image of the skull in the painting, back closer to what it would normally look like below.

Without any computer assistance we can simply view the Holbein painting from a sharp angle—in this case from the top-right side looking down or, simply tilt the canvas. Pictured below is the stretched-out skull corrected to a more normal view—looking at it from this angle.

Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve were the French Ambassadors depicted in the painting which is housed at the National Gallery, London.

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only the Camera Obscura lens would have provided this view to an artist, the way it did

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As a recurring theme in art, a skull signifies a reminder of memento mori (reference Frans Hals, De Zurbarán and Van Gogh for instance).

WATCH Alex Boxer demonstrate precisely how the anamorphic projection within Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors over 491 years ago, was solved.

Boxer shows that without a doubt Holbein knew exactly what he was doing.

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1638
FRANCISCO DE ZURBARÁN (1598-1664)
De Zurbarán also painted a skull in more than one of his paintings.

In particular St. Francis at Prayer (1638) where we see the skull compressed somewhat–it’s been suggested by about 10%–which would be caused due to optics.

More and more of the great pieces of art by many of the European masters are being revealed to have been assisted in their creation due to either the Camera Lucida, Camera Ottica or Camera Obscura.

Optics very early on has played an important role in a variety of entertainment forms including that of science as I will show as we travel along through the ages of pre cinema.

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This according to Cardano, if they had an elevated plano mirror trained on the site and a second handheld mirror into which that image might be reflected.

This is bordering on the study of telescopic mirrors.

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In 1550, ‘On Subtlety’  was published by three different printers and Cardano’s work would bear the caveat that any of the images from enemy territory would be so reduced in size as to “only be detected by the sharpest vision.”

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1550-1551
Girolamo Cardano was a superstar of his age, who championed the Camera Obscura for artists of his time. Cardano initiated the use of a convex lens in the pinhole to upright the image.

GIROLAMO CARDANO (1501 – 1576)
In 1550 Girolamo Cardano presented his 16^th century live cinema using the Camera Obscura as had Villanova, with his patrons sitting inside while viewing the show which was taking place outside. He detailed in his writings, the sharp images he was able to achieve with the use of a bi-convex lens in the aperture.

Cardano makes more appearances in the history of pre cinema.

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Remember, Camera Obscuras were once the size of rooms and still can be.

Like Della Porta and Villa Nova told us, they were dark chambers where people could easily sit inside and watch the image of the outside world on a wall even though it was upside down until up-righted.

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In these engravings we see a depiction of Nostradamus (1503-1566) in the image directly below, drawing circles and symbolic signs in front of Catherine de’ Medici who discovers in the very next image, through a Magic Mirror, the succession of those who were to reign in France after her.

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And here below we see a wonderful quote by Gaston Tissandier, in the publication La Nature in 1887 of his thoughts on this kind of technology used by Nostradamus and Robertson, over the ages;

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Della Porta gives a thorough description of a Camera Obscura and the images that one would see. His most famous work, Magia Naturalis (Natural Magic, 1558, expanded in 1589), explored natural phenomena, optics, alchemy, and early scientific methods, distinguishing between natural and supernatural explanations while promoting empirical observation.

He made significant contributions to optics, describing the Camera Obscura and early lens experiments, influencing later developments in photography. Della Porta also wrote on cryptography, notably in De Furtivis Literarum Notis (1563), where he discussed ciphers and code-breaking techniques.

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From about this point on, the Camera Obscura would become a useful tool to artists. 

Translated through the work of Zielinski, Della Porta begins his XVII Book of the Magiae Naturalis with the study of mirrors by saying “It is also possible, using flat mirrors, to see things that are happening in far-off places . . .” (Chapter 2, paragraph 4). 

Chapter VI provides us with his Obscurum Cubiculum or Camera Obscura, where he tells us “how hunting scenes and battles and other kinds of hocus pocus can be made and performed in a room. Guest performances, battle fields, games, or what you will, so clear, distinct, and pretty to see as though it were taking place before your very eyes.”

Porta explains,  “For the image is let into the eye through the eyeball just as here through the window.”

In keeping with the true showmen of this century, Porta continues to describe the common film of today . . . 

“Namely, opposite to the room where you desire to see this, there must be a large, level space that the sun can shine down upon, where can be placed all manner of trees, forests, rivers, or mountains as well as animals, and these can be real or artificial, of wood or other material… There can be stags, wild boars, rhinoceroses, elephants, lions and other animals, whatever one wants to be seen; they can slowly creep out of their corners into the space, and then the hunter can appear and stage a hunt.”

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Giovanni Battista della Porta pictured above left, is an engraving c. 1600. A natural philosopher, he was born near Naples, Italy, and spent most of his life in that area, establishing the Accademia dei Segreti (Academy of the Mysteries of Nature) which met at his house.

He published many books on nature, magic and science, but is best remembered for his work on optics and steam power. He deduced that a lens was better if placed in a pinhole camera, and worked on ways of improving vision using lenses.

The Inquisition banned his books between 1592-1598.

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It is to Porta that we owe the explanation of the phenomenon produced by “a light beam entering a dark room.”

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Porta described what we see in a cinema, 467 years ago.

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Porta talks again of the Camera Obscura at great length in a later version of Magiae Naturalis (1658, p363) which is twenty volumes in length. He expands on what he calls his “secrets,” namely, the use of the lens in the aperture;

The excerpt above is taken from my first edition published in 1999.

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No one invented the Camera Obscura, because no one invented the Pinhole Image. The Pinhole Image has been seen in its natural state since man’s beginning. Without the Pinhole Image we would not have photography. We would only have hand-drawn Flip Books.

TELE MIRRORS AND LENSES IN THE 16TH CENTURY
ETTORE AUSONIO (1520–1570)
This is an incredible entry in this study simply because it’s hard to fully grasp that it happened, but more so because there is little information on it, and what there is, is hard to find. Suffice to say, I am still looking into this fascinating look at long distance tele-mirrors, what they were, did they work and if so, how?

There are several references to them and people who knew about them and such which I will share below.

Even more so is the question, why are they not part of our world today? Or are they?

Practical optical knowledge of mirrors and lenses in conjunction with the Camera Obscura was first suggested in a manuscript in the 16th century by the Venetian Ausonio.

Ausonio is best known for his work on concave spherical mirrors, detailed in his manuscript Theorica Speculi Concavi Sphaerici (1592–1601), a copy of which was later studied by Galileo. He was the first to integrate the problems of the burning point (where light rays converge to ignite) and image formation in concave mirrors, identifying that the burning point coincides with the point where the image’s orientation inverts.

This concept of the “inversion point” was a notable advancement in practical optics, moving beyond the medieval perspectivist tradition. His work influenced later developments, including Giovanni Battista della Porta’s studies on convex lenses and Galileo’s telescope.

^{Image Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937}

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“And this mirror of his, as I have said, is so amazing, that those who see it are stupefied. If I were to write of all the strange and bizarre things, I saw in this one and in others made in different ways, and recount all their curious effects, it would be endless, and even with all that I might say, it would finally be nothing compared to the actual phenomenon.”

^{-Leonardo Fioravanti reference to Ettore Ausonio in his encyclopedic survey of various arts, 1567}

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One of the earliest references to a functioning telescopic mirror occurs as a laconic observation in the documents of Charles de Marillac (1510-1560).

De Marillac was the French Ambassador to England (Henry VIII) in the spring of 1541.

As we read;

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Readers may know and/or recall the story told about Julius Caesar’s survey of Britain from Gaul using the same technology—tele-mirrors. 

This “old Italian” as de Marillac called Ausonio, would likely have thought it a plausible feat. Did it happen?  Because Telescopes, as optical instruments, were not invented until the early 17th century. What were tele-mirrors?

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Another ancient mirror is from the Sienese engineer Vannoccio Biringuccio in his De la Pirotechnia in 1540 which included a tale about some kind of apparatus in Tunis that projected the ships and people over in the port of Goletta, “and in what colours and clothes they were dressed.”

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Magnifying mirrors were a popular topic in mid-16th-century Italy. In the 1567 edition of his encyclopedic survey of arts, Leonardo Fioravanti concluded his description of mirror-making with a reference to Ausonio, the acknowledged master in the trade of looking glasses;

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During this decade, while Ausonio was affiliated with the famed Venetian publisher Michele Tramezzino, an unnamed writer wrote to him about some kind of tele-vision using mirrors.

Here is what the unknown and un-named correspondent is documented as having said to Ausonio;

The document purportedly included a sketch of two towers, having large plane mirrors in the piazza and on the roof of one tower, and the other outfitted with an observation room.

The sketch has since been lost to history, so I created something like what it describes, below.

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Ausonio received a second letter in this same period. Francesco Angelo Coccio, a well-known translator of Greek and Latin materials, composed it in 1557 from Treviso, some fifteen miles from Venice.

Because of what the letter says, the distance is critical;

Despite the surreal thought of “glasses for seeing far,” fifteen miles seems a bit much. 

There are grounds to think that Coccio had a broad concept of telescopic vision and that he, not Ausonio, imagined that such an effect was generated using glass lenses rather than mirrors.

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^{Image Guillaume de Digulleville, Pélerinage de vie humaine, Paris, c.1390-1400}

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This business of long-distance viewing, tele-mirrors or telescope vision regardless of what we call it, keeps rearing its head like unicorns and fire breathing dragons. 

Did they exist? 

And if so, how did they work? 

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As did Porta, Barbaro suggested the use of the Camera Obscura to the painter. In describing the use of the lens, he shows that the image is much sharper and can therefore be outlined by a pen. Barbaro was a Venetian scholar, diplomat, and polymath known for his contributions to architecture, mathematics, and optics, among other fields.

Born into a prominent Venetian family, he was a key figure in the Renaissance, blending humanist learning with practical applications in science and art. Barbaro is particularly noted for his work in optics and his association with the Camera Obscura.

In his influential book La Pratica della Perspettiva (The Practice of Perspective), published in 1568, Barbaro provided one of the earliest detailed descriptions of the Camera Obscura as a tool for artists and scientists.

He explained how to use the device to project images of external scenes onto a surface, aiding in accurate perspective drawing. Importantly, Barbaro was among the first to describe the use of a biconvex lens in the camera obscura to improve image clarity, a significant advancement over earlier pinhole-based designs.

I love how Barbaro refers to the room as being “the camera.”

His work built on earlier studies of optics by figures like Alhazen and was informed by his interactions with artists and architects, including his patronage of Andrea Palladio. Barbaro’s writings helped popularize the Camera Obscura, influencing its use in art and early scientific observation, laying groundwork for later developments in photography.

Barbaro writes about the camera being used for producing drawings in correct “perspective” (La Practtica Della Perspecttiva, Barbaro, Venice, Italy, 1568).

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Daniel Barbaro promoted the use of the Camera Obscura for artistic purposes in the centuries before photography was discovered. The dark chamber was about to shrink in size from a room to a box, not long after Barbaro’s passing.

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1571
LEONARD DIGGES (1515-1559)
THOMAS DIGGES (1546-1595)
The senior Leonard and son Thomas, two mathematicians from London, publish their Pantometria (A Geometricall Practise Named Pantometria, Digges, L and T, London, 1571).
They spoke of making far objects look nearer.

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 In 1554 Leonard took part in an unsuccessful rebellion led by the Protestant Sir Thomas Wyatt against England’s new Catholic Queen Mary better known as Bloody Mary, who took the throne in 1553.

Digges was condemned to death, but escaped capital punishment, instead forfeiting all his estates.

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Thomas Digges followed in his father’s footsteps and was a pivotal player in the popularisation of Copernicus’s book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.

Pictured above, A geometrical practice, named Pantometria, first book called Longimetria.

1572
FREIDRICH RISNER (1533-1580)
Risner was a German mathematician and astronomer, best known for his work in optics during the Renaissance. He’s a key figure in the pre cinema lineage because he compiled, edited, and published works on lenses, perspective, and optical instruments that influenced later practitioners of visual projection.

Risner translates Alhazen’s Optics into Latin and mentions in his own Opticae (pictured) published after his death, the Camera Obscura to reduce and enlarge drawings and says “it can delineate easily and accurately, topographical views.”

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Risner also relates to the reader the idea of a transportable apparatus and current knowledge on alchemy by the Arabic scientists.

A Risner Opticae illustration of his transportable apparatus below, 1572.

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Risner suggested that rather than a darkened room, a wooden hut would make a more useful Camera Obscura since it could be moved.

Here is another Camera Obscura illustration from Freidrich Risner’s, Opticae, p50 from 1572 (p50, 1615 edition also).

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To complete the project, he made two more holes in the wall higher up to allow a line of sunlight to strike the aperture.

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Below is an illustration of the Santa Maria Novella Church in Florence Italy as the church Danti used for his optical experiment and as it looks today.

^{Illustration Jim Egan}

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WATCH the floor of a Florence cathedral due to the gnomon / pinhole phenomenon take place before your eyes. Watch until the end. All because of the Pinhole Image which turns the cathedral into one of the world’s largest Camera Obscuras.

It’s in Italian, but all imagery is in English.

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Following the motion of the sun disk, through a Camera Obscura was a common method of timekeeping in the Renaissance. The shadow cast by the tip of the gnomon on a sundial corresponds to the solar disc in a Camera Obscura.

These “camera obscura—solar disc—calendar chambers” were used in Italy to demonstrate that the Julian calendar was off by 10 days with the sun, which prompted Pope Gregory to revise the calendar in 1582 to the Gregorian calendar.

Only one individual in Renaissance England is known to have utilised a “camera obscura room,” according to written records uncovered by researchers studying the history of the Camera Obscura. This was British Empire’s John Dee (1527-1608).

Jim Egan of the Newport Tower Museum in Rhode Island, has concluded that the Camera Obscura played a “timekeeping” role in the Tower’s purpose when he states;

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Tabula Scalata are formed by transferring two images on opposite sides of vertical wooden prisms. The history of Tabula Scalata dates back to the 1500s, when it found acceptance in England as a newly introduced form of art. Tabula Scalata could be vertical or horizontal but most were vertical.

A form of vertical montage as it’s been called by many.

If you have been driving and seen a changing billboard with at least two advertising images blending to and from each other, you have seen a Tabula Scalata. The only difference with these 21^st century mechanical billboards of today, is you don’t have to change your viewing perspective from this side to that. The billboard will do that for you.

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Tabula Scalata does not appear to have an origin or an originator, but Jean François Niceron whom I will speak on in coming chapters, has been mentioned. And, it is cited in Shakespeare’s writings as well as other period literature.

In particular Richard II, Act II, Scene ii, 17 where we read;

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows
Which shows like grief itself but is not so;
For sorrow’s eyes, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects,
Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon
Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry Distinguish form.
So your sweet Majesty, Looking awry upon your lord’s departure,
Find shapes of grief more than himself to wail,
Which, looked on as it is, is naught but shadows Of what it is not.
Then, thrice-gracious queen, More than your lord’s departure weep not.
More is not seen, Or if it be, ’tis with false sorrow’s eye,
Which for things true weeps things imaginary,

Which Tabula Scalata Shakespeare was referring to I am still trying to find. Pictured is Niceron’s Tabula Scalata from La Perspective Curieuse with illustration and description in Latin. SEE and read it here.

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This portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots on the right, was discovered underneath a portrait of John Maitland, one time Lord Chancellor of Scotland. Mary had been painted first, within her lifetime or very shortly after her beheading in 1587.

It’s in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. These were politically dangerous times however, and its Dutch painter Adrian Vanson thought it better to distance himself from Mary, and paint Maitland on top of her instead.

_{Xray photograph of Maitland, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh
MQoS, National Portrait Gallery, London}

Conservator Dr. Caroline Rae Skelly at the Courtauld Institute of Art when photo-X-raying the Vanson portrait of Maitland had the ghostly image of a woman’s face pop out at her—almost as if another 16th century pre cinema illusion was unravelling itself in front of her.

This composite Xray photograph of Maitland/Mary on the left is held at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and was sourced through the Smithsonian Magazine. Could this be the painting the woman and skull Tabula Scalata was based on?

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The Tabula Scalata was very cinematic for the 1500’s

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Two-way pictures were made from wooden spars found on ships cut into prism-shapes or triangles. They were later painted onto accordion-pleated heavy card stock. Both methods produced a background of vertically-angled planes facing in opposite directions.

_{Sacred Heart of Mary-Sacred Heart of Jesus, printed by Lemecies c. 1840 and found in Mannoni’s Eyes, Lies, And Illusions: The Art of Deception, 2004, pp234 and 235}

When viewed from the front, they either made no sense or resembled a strange looking painting. The two images only make sense, and separately I might add, when viewed from one side or the other. Whether viewed from the right or left, just one of the two images will appear as a complete picture.

A Dissolving View from 300 years in the future or Fade in-Fade out from 400 years in the future.

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Christ and the Madonna, Guido Reni (1575–1642), oil on paper strips, laid onto two sides of a triangular-shaped panel. Jüdisches Museum, Frankfurt.

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The next time you’re driving past a mechanical billboard, watch it turn to it’s next advertisement. You’ll be looking at a modern Tabula Scalata on either two or three of the three-sided triangular strips. These are images from TriVision, a company that makes two and three-sided mechanical billboards for highway advertising, based on the Tabula Scalata of the 1500s.

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TRISCENEORAMAS
Trisceneoramas also known as Tabula Stritta, are three-way pictures that are part of the same tradition as the Tabula Scalata. Identical to the Tabula Scalata except for one thing; now we have three images that can be seen separate from each other.

_{Animations triplex-photos}

The three portraits are painted as strips once more, with a recessed ‘central picture’ in the centre and the other two on the strips front and to either side of the back. The main theme is visible from the front; the other two paintings are unveiled from the sides, with topics that are often related to the main subject.

_{Animations triplex-photos}

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FAST FORWARD TO LENTICULAR PRINTING
On 23 October 1906 Hiram C. J. Deeks was awarded US patent № 834048 [pictured] (application 25 November 1904) for a “Material for printing multiple photographs” that used a very similar procedure.

Photographic paper on crenelated cardboard with miniscule ridges formed by being firmly pressed, were exposed to two different images from two different viewpoints. Under this patent Deeks and Company promoted postcards with changing photographs or diagrams, first called Photochange Post Cards and later as Puzzle Post Cards.

The pictures in some noteworthy examples would change from a face to a skull as we’ve seen with Mary – portrayed in comparable size/position.

Deeks also sold a Colourchange Post Card with tiny corrugations that had identical images on both sides but were sprayed with different “liquid pigment or coloring substance” on different areas of each side. The technique was granted US patent No. 856519 on June 11, 1907 [SEE it here] (application filed September 24, 1906).

The fundamental premise of Tabula Scalata later evolved into the foundation for lenticular printing of the 20^th century.

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SEE lenticular printing up close here with a short video from Michael Brown. Four hundred and fifty years in the making.

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Benedetti was an Italian mathematician who studied astronomy and optics, and designed sundials. 

He had no education beyond the age of seven.

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1590
THE COLOUR ORGAN
PROJECTING MUSIC IN COLOUR
GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO (1527-1593)
Arcimboldo was the earliest to attempt to match pictures with sound long before the 19^th century pre cinema pioneers. Gregorio Comanini states it all began here;

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1725
Louis Bertrand Castel (1688-1757) suggested his own concept of an Ocular Harpsichord, a notable cultural phenomenon of the European Enlightenment, meant to play ‘colour music.’

Castel asked why harpsichords for the eyes weren’t also made. It was then known as the Clavecin Oculaire.

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1877
The Bainbridge Bishop Colour Organ for “painting music” on a semi-circular-shaped screen was displayed at the Phineas T. Barnum Museum in New York in 1877 (now in Connecticut). Bishop started working on his Color Organ two years prior. He was not so much a doer as he was a thinker.

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In his own words, taken from a pamphlet he wrote to accompany his Colour Organ in 1877, and including a schematic image of his music projector, Bainbridge Bishop wrote;

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The term Colour Organ denotes a mechanical device built to embody sound, specifically music, in a filmic or pictorial medium. In 1590, Arcimboldo defined this as creating “colour music,” embracing a radiance or glow.

In 1977 it was depicted in a film, interacting with aliens.

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Mechanical Colour Organs first debuted as physical instruments in the 18th century, modelled on the pipe organ. This particular film pays homage to this pre cinema device by playing the iconic note sequence to the alien visitors: 🎶G, 🎶A, 🎶F, 🎶F, and 🎶C.

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There’s many more examples I could go into, found in an absolutely rich history of projecting music through colour.

Suffice to say I think you get the idea.

A fascinating case of mixing sound with coloured movement all within the pre cinema period.

1593
GIOVANNI BATTISTA DELLA PORTA (1538-1615)
Porta returns to our study of pre cinema because in a paper published on refraction called De Refractione, Porta compares the eye to the camera and refers to vision, prisms, colours and optics in general, including lenses.

Refraction in the optical department of physics is the change in direction of a wave of light travelling within a medium such as water or glass. The light will change its course drastically in the medium, that two streams can be seen.

With regard to the pencil in a glass of water below, we see two pencils even though there is only one pencil, because the light is refracted into two streams.

When light is refracted by itself with no object, it refracts into seven streams-the seven colours of the light spectrum called a rainbow. The most widely observed optical phenomena is light refraction.

Refraction not only can be seen in the medium of water or glass but if a prism is used, the white light will refract and open to show the colour spectrum hidden inside.

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Porta investigated the anatomical features of the eye in chapter 3 and compared it to the camera. Pictured is p68 (chapter 3) which dealt in light and visual effects. Refraction is found in chapters 1 and 2; and lenses and mirrors in chapter 8.

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Porta lived during the Scientific Revolution and Reformation in Naples. His most renowned work was Magia Naturalis, first published in 1558. He explored a wide range of topics like the occult, astrology, alchemy, and natural philosophy.

He was known as the “professor of secrets.”

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TOP
CHAPTER FOUR

Welcome	About	Introduction	Chapter One beginning of time – 999 AD
Chapter Two 1000 AD – 1399	Chapter Three 1400 – 1599	Chapter Four 1600 – 1649	Chapter Five 1650 – 1699
Chapter Six 1700 – 1749	Chapter Seven 1750 – 1799	Chapter Eight 1800 – 1819	Chapter Nine 1820 – 1829
Chapter Ten 1830 – 1839	Chapter Eleven 1840 – 1849	Chapter Twelve 1850 – 1859	Chapter Thirteen 1860 – 1869
Chapter Fourteen 1870 – 1879	Chapter Fifteen 1880 – 1884	Chapter Sixteen 1885 – 1889	Chapter Seventeen 1890 – 1894
Chapter Eighteen 1895 – 1899	Chapter Nineteen 1900 + post cinema	Chapter Twenty 1911 +	Copyright
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