In the 1820-1830s, the so-called optical boom swept Europe. The idea arose that optical instruments - from lorgnets to telescopes - should become a part of everyday life. It was then that the concept of "armed eye" appeared. The fascination with optics has also influenced European culture.
Craze
The services of the astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822) in the creation of new telescopes gained fame throughout Europe, and the fascination with optics penetrated into the everyday life of wealthy people. Optical toys and entertainment have become extremely popular. Even home telescopes appeared, which brought a lot of joy to children.
After a new stage of excavations in Pompeii in the 1830s, interest in antiquity revived. Tourists were advised to take binoculars and lorgnets on their travels, which were considered indispensable for sightseeing, even if the traveler saw perfectly.
Spyglasses were part of the gentleman's kit for every cultural traveler, not to mention professional travelers.
The artists depicted tourists with optical devices in their hands on their canvases, prompting travelers to look at the sights with an armed eye. There were codes of rules dictating how to hold a lorgnette and view a Gothic castle or an Egyptian pyramid in it.
The marine painters depicted Christopher Columbus with a telescope in his hands, not thinking that telescopes appeared much later. Admirers of historical painting justified their idols, saying that the masters of historical paintings "provided" Columbus with an ordinary hollow pipe, without optics, and such pipes were already in the Renaissance.
Promotional video:
Passion for miniature books
In the 1820s, it became fashionable in England to read books through a magnifying glass. This introduced a kind of romance into the reading process. And publishing historians believe that this was a real revolution in publishing.
Publisher William Pickering (1796-1854) introduced soft binding into book publishing, and this allowed him to create the Diamond Classics series. These editions were easy to carry in your pocket.
Pickering decided to make the poems and novels miniature, and the complete works of each author were enclosed in a box with a magnifying glass. Each such box was the embodiment of grace and delicate taste.
These books were a great gift. But the goal of the publisher was to ensure that the books were taken with them and read in carriages and stagecoaches, armed with a strong magnifying glass. They wanted to inspire the travelers with lyric poetry.
Using a magnifying glass, 19th century publishers tried to get kids interested in reading.
Children liked to twirl a magnifying glass in their hands and look through letters. The spreads of children's books were specially arranged taking into account the fact that they would be examined with an armed eye.
Even after the optical boom was over, publishers continued to publish baby books, competing to make beautiful folding magnifying glasses. They became good teaching aids, souvenirs and still exist today.
Panoramas from boxes
In Germany, at the end of the 17th century, the so-called panoramic boxes - gukcastens - appeared. They were set up in the streets for fun. Each drawer had a peephole with a lens, and anyone could see a three-dimensional panorama in it for a small fee. The feeling of depth was achieved due to the fact that the cardboard figures were located at eye level, but at different distances from the viewer's face.
As a rule, panoramic boxes amused spectators with city views. The owner of the box (guckestner) could set the cardboard figures in motion, and then small everyday scenes were played out against the background of streets and squares. Gukkestner turned the handles, so that the audience could see through the peephole fiacras and stagecoaches, festive processions and parades, performances of street bands and traveling circuses.
With the advent of all kinds of transparencies, panoramic drawer manufacturers were able to complicate the movement of figures and diversify urban views.
Thanks to the method of overlaying transparencies with pictures, it became possible to demonstrate to viewers the sunrise and sunset, the twinkling of stars and the movement of celestial bodies. The movement of transparent films was invisible to the eyes, and the illusion was created that the figures were moving by themselves, and the stars were hanging in the air.
For two centuries, the panoramic box has been one of the most popular symbols of German urban culture. Through him, children learned what a cityscape, a street scene is, memorized what the main urban types look like. All of this was in ordinary engravings and lithographs, but the magical peephole of the box made city life more attractive.
Decembrists through the lens
A profile image of five executed Decembrists is known to every student. Having turned into a bas-relief in the USSR and acquired the plastic properties of a volumetric sculpture, the graphic sheet became a real symbol of the era. The author of this image was the artist William James Linton (1812-1898), who became widely known in the former USSR. In terms of the number of mentions of his name (and it stood under every reproduction of the bas-relief in periodicals and on the covers of books), the artist's fame in Russia far outweighs his fame in his homeland - in Great Britain.
Despite the fact that the similarity with those portrayed was more than distant, it was this image that paved its way to record print runs. The number of reproductions of Linton's engraving goes to tens of millions of copies of books, magazines, newspapers, school textbooks.
William Linton created a group portrait of the Decembrists in 1855, when he was already well over forty. For Linton, a perfectly respectable artist, private earnings were not a stern necessity. The fact that Linton took on the execution of an unusual order - the creation of portraits of people whom he had never seen before - could be an accident, because in the artist's homeland this work is not given almost any importance.
Linton met the customer of the "bas-relief" Herzen at a difficult moment in his life. The family doctor told the artist that his wife was suffering from a serious mental illness. Linton was shocked by this diagnosis, his character became completely unbearable. And work saved him from bouts of rage and periods of depression. The artist took orders for illustrating books, including those on optics and astronomy.
A. I. Herzen was the same age as Linton - they were both born in 1812. Two talented people met in London, where Herzen was hiding from the oppression of the tsarist government. He told Linton a lot about the Decembrist movement.
In 1854, a kind of political circle was formed, which included Herzen, Linton and the Polish revolutionary-emigrant Zenon Sventoslavsky. Linton learned a lot about the history of Russia, for the first time heard from Herzen the names of the executed Decembrists and agreed to create a cover for the magazine "Polar Star".
Let's take a look at the bas-relief.
One feels that the artist saw the depicted Decembrists through the lens, but why? There is an assumption that Linton could have used the "blank" for some other engraving - for a scientific book on optics or astronomy.
Due to the unexpected optical effects, there is an eerie impression that huge heads are flying through the cosmic abyss. It is no coincidence that Soviet artists simplified this bas-relief many times and eliminated the illusion of the presence of a lens.
Each of the depicted Decembrists has a signature in Russian. Let us ask ourselves a question: would we recognize specific people if these signatures were not there? For example, K. F. Ryleev does not look young at all. Pestel looks about 55-60 years old. We also do not see the sideburns of Muravyov-Apostol, but this is part of a recognizable image. The artist paid much more attention to optics, conveying the features of a glass lens, than reflecting the exact features of the faces depicted in the engraving.
Optical fun of the impressionists
It is known that Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters reflected the immediate impression of the subject. They were interested in seeing the world from the train window or analyzing the fast movement of the city, in which houses and trees seem to be blurry. But their favorite technical devices were not trains or stagecoaches, but optical toys. Impressionist historians unanimously argue that the artists chose the studio of the photographer Nadar (1820-1910) as the place of their first meeting.
The opportunity to see unusual color combinations in a kaleidoscope or to synthesize white on the basis of a rotating disc with seven primary colors prompted painters to think about the need to put oil painting on a scientific basis.
Optical fun played an important role in the formation of the impressionist theory of color. In painting, the so-called optical mixture of colors began to prevail, in which not the colors on the palette are mixed, but the impressions of strokes of different colors located nearby.
The Impressionists constantly read treatises on optics and anatomy of the eye. They became very interested in the fact that the eye can retain the images seen on the retina for some time, and they built their paintings almost like illustrations for books on optics, reflecting diffraction and interference of light beams. Working in optics, artists foresaw many discoveries in the field of cinematography.
The invention of cinema owes much to optical toys. Cinematography brought optics closer to everyday life, and the optical boom lost its sharpness. It is generally accepted that it began to decline in the middle of the 19th century, although the expression "to look with an armed eye" has survived in many languages.