(Few descriptions of European lens making before early modern times survive. According to Dennis Simms, a historian of optical technology, the earliest method of pouring glass into molds for lenses originated in the Islamic world a thousand years ago, and from 1550 to 1950 it was refined by attaching blanks to templates and grinding and polishing them with other templates of opposite curvature. Vincent Ilardi, who has studied the economics of the Renaissance Italian eyeglass trade, adds that this process required little skill once blanks and molds for appropriate correction could be duplicated. Despite automation of the optical industry in the last fifty years, a cottage industry survives in the hills of the Veneto.)10
Florence also had an ideal legal climate for a new technological field. Venice guarded spectacle making as an extension of its luxury glass industry, even threatening to imprison relatives of workers who emigrated. In Florence, there was no separate guild of spectacle makers, and artisans openly proclaimed that they would teach their craft to women and even to little boys and girls (putti). It was an atmosphere ideal for the transfer of skills and knowledge. But while Florence was outstanding, it was not unique. Other cities and monasteries in Italy also had flourishing opticians, and spectacle making spread to northern Europe.
Was it a coincidence that the spectacle trade was flourishing not just in Florence but in cities and monasteries throughout Italy at the very time when paper mills and printing presses had been spreading through Europe? Printed matter and eyeglasses served the same markets: priests, laymen, clerks, students, merchants, artisans, all avidly reading or doing other skilled detailed work. As early as 1340, up to half the six- to thirteen-year-old children of Florence were in school, and by the end of the fifteenth century, 70 percent of the people of Valenciennes, France, were said to be able to read. While only a small proportion of literate people owned books, those who did often associated them with eyeglasses. At least one early binding has a compartment for spectacles, and the impression of an eyeglass frame has been found in another book. The book crafts also demanded magnification. If manuscript illuminators must have worked with crystals and later with spectacles, so must punch cutters and typefounders. And eyeglasses also benefited printing economically. They helped make possible smaller-format editions that saved high-priced paper. A growing number of scholars and artisans, especially middle-aged and older ones, were able to work longer with finer detail. In fact, the historian Lynn White, Jr., suggests that vision aids had a profound effect on the careers of Europeans, allowing older men to remain in positions of authority long after their eyes could no longer read texts unaided; this expanded readership probably helped create the market for early printing. Eyeglasses and print were thus part of a technological complex.11
Useful as they were, spectacles were crude by nineteenth- and twentieth-century standards. The glass was heavier than today’s, doubly convex for presbyopia or doubly concave for myopia. It had impurities and, sometimes, coloring based on doubtful medical ideas—or, as today, for protection from the sun. There was no way to fit them securely. The lenses might be close enough to the face to be brushed by the wearer’s eyelashes. Many sellers were untrained peddlers who carried an assortment for trial by the customer. No standard for measuring lens strength existed.
With all these shortcomings, it is no wonder that spectacles had an equivocal reputation in their first three or four centuries of use. On one hand, this technology was linked with a prestigious and still uncommon technique: reading. On the other hand, it had no basis in science. Medieval students of optics were uninterested in them and played no part in developing them, although the theologian Nicholas of Cusa, in De Beryllo (1458), commended lenses as instruments allowing reason to penetrate further into the world.12
AUGUST AND ASININE OPTICS
Lenses divided the Renaissance against itself, appearing in turns wise and silly. When Tomaso da Modena painted the chapter hall of the church of San Nicolò in Treviso, near Venice, in 1352, he depicted forty prominent Dominicans reading, writing, or thinking. Among these were Cardinal Nicholas of Rouen peering through a magnifier, and Cardinal Hugo of Provence writing with hinged eyeglasses on his nose. Early in the next century, Jan van Eyck painted one of the wealthiest men of his community, Canon George van der Paele of Bruges, in the presence of the Virgin, carrying in his hand a small-format breviary and a pair of folding eyeglasses as signs of his learning. For such distinguished clerics, eyeglasses were already two things: a badge of their wearers’ station in life, but also an aspect of their personality, as they would be of public figures even in the twentieth century. Thomas More may also have chosen to be depicted wearing them. And the trend was projected back anachronistically into the past, in representations of learned men of antiquity like Virgil and St. Jerome.13
There was also a less flattering alternative convention, as the drawings of Peter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525–1569), widely reproduced as engravings, illustrate. The uncomprehending, thin-lipped, philistine connoisseur peering over a painter’s shoulder, with hand on purse to complete the deal, wears spectacles; the wild-haired, passionately engaged artist does not. An ass looks into a schoolroom over a shelf with a musical score and a pair of glasses, as though to underscore the uselessness of all aids to learning for those incapable of understanding. Apes loot the wares of a traveling merchant, including glasses among other reputedly idle trinkets such as Jew’s harps: a clear reference to the contemporary epithet “spectacle seller” to mean a deceiver of the gullible, the poor quality of his wares obscuring rather than sharpening vision. Far from being enlightened, the simians are only demonstrating their usual larceny and vanity. Yet Bruegel and the buyers of his prints did not dismiss optics entirely. In his allegorical series of the virtues, Temperance is wearing a clock on her head and a bit in her mouth, and holding a bridle in one hand and a pair of eyeglasses in the other—all technologies suggesting measure and self-control.14
On balance, Renaissance artists and writers suspected aids to vision. They loved to associate instruments of wisdom with vanity, and to portray the elderly as more foolish than venerable. Eyeglasses advertised not only the infirmities of age but the snares of self-deception and even of deadly sin. In a 1510 woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien, Lust has a bear’s muzzle, donkey’s ears, horns—and giant spectacles representing what later came to be known as the male gaze. On the opening page of Sebastian Brant’s famous Ship of Fools (1494) appears a woodcut of an eyeglass-wearing, donkey-eared book lover (bibliofool?) in cap and bells, armed with a fly-swatter to protect the precious library, whose contents he is unable to understand. A figure with a moronic expression is dead center on the title-page woodcut of Rabelais’s Gargantua (1534). The German physician and alchemist Heinrich Khunrath summarized this suspicion in a tailpiece he had appended to a treatise published in 1599, and that he also used in other works, depicting a bespectacled owl, flanked by two lit candles and holding crossed flambeaux. The caption reads:
What use can torch, light, glasses be
To folk determined not to see?
The symbolism of the bird is still obscure, but the ambiguity of the eyeglasses would have been familiar to all late Renaissance readers.15
By the end of the sixteenth century, the multiplication of books and pamphlets, stimulated by neoclassical learning and raging theological and political controversy, made vision aids more important than ever for the learned, especially those over forty. Privileged and demanding presbyopes, like the great book collector and cryptologist Duke August the Younger of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1579–1666), sought out exceptional craftsmen from centers like Augsburg; in contrast to the Florentine workshops, Duke August’s optician took a full year to fill his first order for two pair. The Duke’s optician later fashioned another pair for eye protection while hunting, complete with rearview mirrors and a set of magnifier glasses called perspective tubes. Despite the Duke’s dependence on and enthusiasm for vision aids, though, published surviving portraits omit them. He may have fel
t sensitive about his eye ailments, but he also might have been reacting to a century of satire. In any case, he was not willing to identify his personality with the technology he used, as Canon van der Paele had evidently been happy to do.16
It was only in southern Europe, in Italy and especially Spain, that first the upper classes and then all sections of society openly prized eyeglasses as extensions and amplifications of the self. Physicians were still skeptical about the medical value of spectacles, but wearers were becoming more devoted. A new type of frame appeared later in the century, secured behind the head with straps, or behind the ears with cords, to permit more comfortable continuous wear. Perhaps the growth of reading material was accelerating the progression of myopia, or perhaps fashion was taking its course, but an engraving around 1580 portrays a professor of medicine and philosophy at the University of Padua, Girolamo Capivaccio, wearing corded glasses with great dignity. In Spain, eyeglasses spread to the very highest circles of society. In 1623, a notary of the Inquisition, Benito Daza de Valdés, even published a treatise on eyeglasses and the spiritual and secular rewards they provide. By then, spectacles were firmly established in the aristocracy. During the 1630s, Jusepe de Ribera painted a member of the exclusive Order of Santiago wearing them with sash and armor, and King Philip II himself was said to have a pair with its frame attached to his hat.17
Once the elite had given their approval, eyeglasses could cease to be mere prostheses and become articles of fashion and status. The Spaniards admired large frames, such as those that Doña Rodriguez wears in Chapter 48 of Don Quixote. And big lenses, fastened behind the ears, became the hallmark of one of El Greco’s greatest paintings, the portrait of a cardinal (usually considered to be the Grand Inquisitor Fernando Niño de Guevera) of around 1600. To later generations of non-Spaniards, the glasses have seemed to proclaim the Inquisition’s piercing gaze, but contemporary scholarship suggests their real purpose for the artist and sitter were different: to remind the cardinal’s enemies at court of his direct appointment by the pope and determination to retain his position against all intrigues. His display of the latest technology was intended to reinforce his skill and resourcefulness. In the end the cardinal lost his inquisitorial position, and spectacles much of their mystique.
In Bartolomé Murillo’s Four Figures on a Step (ca. 1660), a woman thought to represent a madam is wearing the oversized type, ocales, supposedly reserved for the nobility. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish eyewear fashion persisted, but it had become an object of mockery by northern Europeans who saw the glasses as symptoms of pomposity or masks for stupidity.18
SCIENCE AND SPECTACLES
Neither the Spaniards nor their critics appreciated the changes that were beginning in the seventeenth century and that would redefine the debate over optics. For the first time, investigators were beginning to understand the physics of vision and the effects of lenses. The most common explanation in antiquity and the Middle Ages had been that the eye sent out rays. Three stunning accomplishments of the early seventeenth century changed this model. Galileo’s construction of the telescope and his observation of the earthlike contours of the moon suggested that lenses could multiply the powers of human vision to a previously unimagined degree. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), in his work Dioptrice (1611), showed that images are formed by rays of light on the retina passing through the eye’s lens, and René Descartes (1596–1650) presented the law of refraction in his own Dioptrique (1637). These discoveries (and the development of the microscope) meant that the grinding of lenses, once exclusively a craft, was on its way to being a science. Glasses lost their former stigma as suspect devices that distorted as they clarified. They became what they are considered today, corrective instruments compensating for the imperfections of the eye. And where the Spanish aristocracy had sought prestige in heavy optics that must have been as unpleasant to wear as Cardinal Niño de Guevera’s friar’s chair was to sit on, the scientific revolutionaries gave more thought to comfort and utility. It was Kepler who first used optical theory to propose the meniscus lenses in general use today, which have a curved section that virtually eliminates distortion at the edges of the visual field.
The rise of scientific optics did not transform spectacles into an everyday technology of the body for most Europeans and North Americans in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century. Like armchairs and keyboard instruments, high-quality eyeglasses remained luxury goods, made by skilled artisans for limited markets. Kepler’s idea of a curved lens was developed by a Russian theorist in the early eighteenth century, but the design was not widely available until well into the nineteenth. Cheap German spectacles were available in England for as little as fourpence, but optics were crude and frames were cheaply plated. Good glasses, framed in steel or precious metals, cost at least a shilling, and in North America far more.19
Despite the price, there was still no standard for dispensing glasses and no scientific equipment for refracting eyes; buyers usually had to try on multiple pairs. The eighteenth century did make one important contribution to the regular wearing of glasses: in the 1720s, English opticians introduced temple spectacles with solid side pieces swinging out on hinges, and sometimes double-hinged for greater compactness. This new design was soon recognized as the best way to keep the lenses properly positioned on the face and remains the standard. Those who could afford effective glasses bought and used them. But outside Spain, vision aids were still slightly embarrassing acknowledgments of infirmity. George Washington, who owned a double-hinged pair, was said to have excused himself when using them in public, explaining that “I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” The many eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century spectacles on display at the New-York Historical Society with hinged or sliding temples appear as substantial optical instruments, not as fashion. The temples often terminate in circles of a diameter of two or three centimeters, which pressed against the side of the head.20
Despite the expense and awkwardness, attitudes were changing. A few politicians were even proud of their vision aids. The Society owns paintings of both Patrick Henry and Aaron Burr wearing glasses, though pushed up on their foreheads. The association of glasses with education must have appealed to both, yet neither felt comfortable with glasses as part of the permanent record of his face. That step was, of course, taken by Benjamin Franklin, who really did cement halves of concave and convex lenses together in one frame to create the first bifocals and avoid the need for switching between reading and distance glasses. And a few other scientists, inventors, and artists also did not hide their use of glasses. In old age Jean-Baptiste Chardin painted himself wearing a tortoiseshell pair. But it was American scientist-artist siblings who showed the nascent acceptance of vision aids most strikingly. In 1801, the painter Rembrandt Peale depicted his brother, the young botanist Rubens Peale, with the still rare geranium that Rubens had grown from seed for the first time in America. Rembrandt showed Rubens’s glasses in his hand. But family and friends believed that because Rubens wore the glasses constantly for his extreme farsightedness, they should be on his head, so Rembrandt added a second pair masterfully to his brother’s forehead.21
AFFIRMING THE ARTIFICIAL
Rubens Peale, for whom glasses had opened a new world, was a pioneer of new attitudes. Over the 1800s, eyeglasses were transformed. At the beginning of the century they were heavy and costly, or light and almost worthless. By its end, they were stunning examples of the high technology of their day, precision instruments available at least to the lower middle class and the better-off working class. They brought together some of the most advanced chemistry, physics, and medicine of their era, creating new industries and professions. And as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the technology of printing and the skills of reading reinforced each other. Reading built the demand for vision aids, and high-quality glasses helped expand the reading public. We have seen that many medical authorities welcomed infant formula as a superior
alternative to human breast milk, and that countless households began to prefer the performance of a celebrated artist, fixed on a player piano roll, to homemade music. Magazine editors considering submissions started to favor the crude typography of a bar striking through an inked cotton ribbon over the most elegant and legible handwriting. So the eyes were brought into a debate over the future relationship between the human senses and technology. Was the increasing human symbiosis with the mechanical world a source of pride or of alarm? Spectacles, more than any other invention, started and stimulated the debate. If musical and textual keyboards established standard ways to record and transmit information, optics transformed the way Western humanity gathered and absorbed it.
Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity Page 30