Scientific omens of a future cinema

The most recent studies have proposed a redefinition of the term pre-cinema with its insertion into spectacular practices and above all of scientific research, giving particular importance to their connections. There is no "one straight line, or linear perspective, that combines the history of cinema with that of its long incubation and prior preparation. Everything that preceded the occurrence of the conditions for the advent of cinema history is the story of many confluent stories. , parallel, communicating and divergent "(GP Brunetta, The journey of the icononaut, 1997, p. 494).

Historiography on the origins of cinema (in particular the studies of Michel Coissac, Georges Sadoul and Jean Mitry) only partially grasped the extent of the problem. Starting from the seventeenth century, there are descriptions of various types of dark rooms, all based on the simple principle of a ray of light which, through a small hole, recreated the external images inside a dark space. This phenomenon, although already known since ancient times and described in the works of medieval authors such as John Peckham (1240 ca.-1292) or Ibn al-Hayṯam (called Alhazen, ca. 965-1039), takes on particular importance from Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) onwards for its value as a metaphor for vision, traced back to the problem of image formation using optical devices. "The experience, which shows how the objects send their spices or similarities intertwined within the eye in the albugino omore, it is shown when for some small round spiraculo the spices of the aluminized objects will penetrate into a strong dark dwelling. Then you will receive these spices in a white paper placed inside this house somewhat close to it. And you will see all the aforesaid objects in it with their own figures and colors; but they will be lesser and more so, because of the said intersection. Them simulacra, if they are born from the sunlit spot, they are actually painted on it, which is meant to be very thin and seen from the side "(Code D, sheet 8 recto A, 1485-1490). The description is fundamental to understand the moment when the problem of a vision begins to arise ' equipped ', which radically changes the natural vision employed by ancient science. Following Leonardo's research, lenses and mirrors were variously combined in dark rooms, magic lanterns, microscopes, telescopes and countless other optical instruments, to obtain enlarged, shrunken, multiplied figures. Anamorphic projections and mirrors had dominated the scientific literature and continued throughout the eighteenth century to maintain a place of honor in the manufacturers' treatises and advertisements, becoming the simplest and most usual optical amusements. spread interest in science and its tools even outside the narrow circle of specialists, the conquest of new 'audiences' and new 'stages', the proliferation of a scientific literature aimed at the growing number of collectors and amateurs, explain the sensational nineteenth-century developments in the optical-spectacular setting. Eighteenth-century scientism sought the visually striking effect through the application of the physical, perspective, optical and mathematical arguments developed in the Renaissance. Starting from the seventeenth century and, in a more incisive way, from the eighteenth century, the creation and construction of images in spectacular function, thanks to the unprecedented observation possibilities opened by optical instruments, gave birth to a completely new collective visual heritage, in which it prevailed the search for wonder, as in the suggestive descriptions of the microscopic observations traceable in the eighteenth-century scientific texts. The telescope and the microscope, expanding man's perceptive possibilities, determined the widening of his visual, mental, ethical and aesthetic horizons, opening new dimensions and worlds never imagined to his gaze. Observation appropriated new dimensions, new beings, new landscapes, identifying unprecedented objects of wonder, study and speculation, which pushed man to practice new physical and mental spaces. Giovanni Rucellai (1475-1525) in Le api , a poem dedicated to Gian Giorgio Trissino and published posthumously, at the behest of these, in 1539, better known to zoology scholars than to historians of optics, proposes the description of a very first microscopic observation: the bee anatomy examined with a concave mirror, used as a simple microscope. The great Florentine humanist celebrates the wonderful and surprising character of the images enlarged by the mirror, capable of prodigiously transforming an infant into a colossus and a bee into a dragon: "[...] And it would seem incredible, if I narrated / some of their members how are they / which are almost invisible to our eyes [...] / [...] So if you want to know this way, / take a nice shiny and hollowed mirror, / in which the small shape of a child / may it be even from the mother's mouth, / you look like a big colossus, / similar to that of the Sol that was in Rhodes [...] / [...] So you will see multiplying the image / from the concave reflection of the metal, / in such a way, that the of which we are their debtors in natural history, and in anatomy. The aromatic infusions, a drop of vinegar, are populated with such a prodigious quantity of small animals, that Helvetia and China are deserts and loneliness in comparison ... "(1737, pp. 108-09). to the predilection for the infinitely small one also perceives the fact that the optical instruments assigned to its analysis were more accessible to the general public. Algarotti evokes the fantastic stellar panoramas hidden in the eye of an insect, jumping with a singular effect of alienation from the size microscopic to the telescopic one: "If the eye of a fly, which looks like a small, almost formless prominence, looks under the microscope, it appears to be nothing but a compound of thousands and thousands of small eyes, like some nebulous stars in the sky, an anthill of thousands of small stars can be seen with the telescope. In some insects there were even thirty-four and more, each of which, in its extreme smallness, such a perfect crystalline lens, like ours, had "(pp. 109-10).

In the interesting eighteenth-century variant of the solar or projection microscope (halfway between the microscope and the magic lantern), the spectacular dimension became striking: in fact, the instrument projected the highly enlarged image of insects or others into a dark room small animals, by means of the sunlight collected and amplified by a mirror that could be variously inclined, by a microscope and by a converging lens. Small eighteenth-century optical instruments, which had the character of pure and simple divertissements, linked to the playful and gallant spirit of the century, such as polemoscopes, pocket darkrooms, zogroscopes, poliscopes, attest to the growing visual 'curiosity' that the instrument provoked and that would have come to real forms in the following century '

The association between science and entertainment typical of eighteenth-century experimental physics is an obligatory starting point for understanding the developments of the nineteenth century, which saw an expansion of methods, areas and users. The visual dimension was a fundamental aspect of the popularizing spirit of the age of enlightenment: the phenomena of spectacularization necessarily passed through that privileged communication channel which is the gaze. In Nouvelles récréations physiques et mathématiques of 1770, one of the most significant scientific treatises for richness and clarity of display, in describing some suggestive catottric effects of 'moving' the images, Edme Gilles Guyot (1706-1786) observes: "Of all our senses that of sight is certainly the most subject to illusions;

The decisive role of optics in eighteenth-century spectacular experimentalism is perceived by the size of the space dedicated to it by the treatises, as well as by the same methods of scientific dissemination. During the 18th century. the scientists-demonstrators were in fact showmen, capable of captivating and persuading the public by making use of highly suggestive visual experiments, as well as the necessary individual qualities of charm and 'stage presence'. These characters conducted the optics experiences with a vast array of lenses, mirrors, prisms, microscopes, telescopes, dark rooms, optical boxes and magic lanterns, collecting the curiosity and enthusiasm of the spectators. The public's gaze gradually widened to transform itself from Enlightenment curiosity into omnivorous nineteenth-century voyeurism, so pervasive as to be structured in various ways, on the border between science and play, but with a decided prevalence of the more playful aspects; a vast technical manual supported the diffusion of these tools, divulging their use to the countless self-taught scientists. Faced with an ever wider and more diversified demand, the nineteenth-century publishing published continuous texts for the general public, based on the schematization of subjects encoded by eighteenth-century treatises, sometimes conducted on previous reductions (to cite just one example, see the successful translation Recreations in mathematics and natural philosophy, 1803, by Charles Hutton, from the text of 1694 by J. Ozanam). But already between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a scientific and specialist literary production, linked to a closed and sacred conception of knowledge as a treasure of the few and a privilege to be jealously guarded, we had moved on to texts based on an idea of ​​knowledge that took shape precisely from the seventeenth-century scientific revolution and it proved to be the patrimony of many, useful and transmissible, communicable, conceived for the benefit of the entire community, the fruit of the collective and no longer the exclusive prerogative of a very limited number of brains, who conducted their research in all secrecy. The academies and scientific societies that proliferated in Europe in the first decades of the seventeenth century were the field of application of this new idea of ​​knowledge (P. Rossi, The Philosophers and the Machines, 1962, pp. 68-103). The conception of "

From the beginning of the eighteenth century the new experimental method was introduced into the academic environment with the courses of 'natural philosophy' of the first English demonstrators disciples of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), from John Keill (1671-1721) to Francis Hauksbee (1666 -1713?) To John Théophile Desaguliers (1683-1744). In France, Abbot Jean-Antoine Nollet (1700-1770), who followed the path taken by Dutch popularizers and vulgarisers such as Willem Jacob Storm 's Gravesande (1688-1742) and Pieter or Petrus van Musschenbroeck (1692-1761), made populate the method. The first chair of experimental physics in Paris, commissioned by Louis XV at the Collège de Navarre, was assigned to J.-A. Nollet in 1735. From 1743 his six volumes of Leçons de physique expérimentale were published, a work that not only distinguished itself from those that had hitherto appeared in terms of organic and theoretical and methodological completeness and for the wealth of original experiences, but which marked a fundamental milestone on the indicated path of the transition to the great nineteenth-century popularization. The Leçons were in fact informed by a declared didactic intent, which was confirmed in the publication, almost thirty years later, of the Art des expériences (1770), the first manual designed specifically for amateurs, as a guide to the construction of the instruments. -Aignan Sigaud de la Fond (1740-1810), another great French popularizer, pupil and successor of Nollet at the Collège de Navarre, giving to the press in 1775 the work Description et usage d'un cabinet de physique expérimentale explicitly addressed to amateurs : " We cannot therefore encourage enough those amateurs who multiply each day, and who, zealously applying themselves to the study of the facts, try to get the best equipment related to their interests and the kind of work they intend to follow. One cannot therefore expect much from this general taste, which extends to our most distant Provinces, from this noble emulation, which overcomes the difficulties that oppose it and which currently engages almost all Physics Professors in obtaining excellent machines and in setting up the toilets "(p. XV).

Considering the stated intents, the structure and the type of interlocutor to whom these works intended, it was easy to foresee, within a few decades and with the beginning of the new century, the transition from the public and spectacular dimension of science to the private and domestic, with the transformation of the collective show into a private game, or rather into a 'toy'. Gerard L'Estrange Turner, punctually outlining the picture of the passage from the demonstration apparatus of the 18th century. to the varied universe of children's games and amusements of the following century, and particularly of the Victorian age, he underlines how knowledge was consciously or unconsciously absorbed through play (Scientific instruments and experimental philosophy 1550-1850, 1990, p. 384).

The eighteenth-century treaties and the trade cards of the manufacturers clearly show, alongside production aimed at satisfying the demand for complex machines for scientific and professional use, the existence of a vast repertoire of more commonly used tools intended for the playful dimension . The nineteenth-century production was based above all on tools designed in the eighteenth century for individual use, for private play, to which the optical devices of the richest collecting and professional practice were mixed, as evidenced by their presence in the catalogs and descriptions of the most important collections weather. Many types and models of optical boxes and darkrooms were also offered in pocket format as well as prisms, anamorphoses, magic lanterns and other small instruments' useless', completely free from any scientific use, pure and simple divertissements (such as small pocket poliscopes, in wood or brass, known in England with the term dragonfly which, thanks to a prismatic lens, allowed multiplied vision of an object, with a simple but suggestive phantasmagoric effect of figures and colors). The polemoscope, whose invention at the end of the 18th century. it is attributed by Mathurin-Jacques Brisson and by Jean-Étienne Montucla to Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687), it dates back to 1637 and is an even more curious and emblematic case. Telescope equipped with an inclined mirror and a lateral lens, designed as a war instrument, enjoyed great fortune throughout the eighteenth century especially in its portable version, as a theater spectacle. Nollet describes it in detail, underlining its peculiar dimension of "seeing without being seen", on which the well-known darkroom mechanism was based, so seductive and delightful because it placed the viewer in the ambiguous and fascinating position of a voyeur. great variety of optical and catottric boxes for domestic entertainment, united by the same type of private use, mostly individual. The zogroscope, which made its appearance since the early eighteenth century as an elementary variant, for private use, of pantoscopes or new worlds, was one of the most interesting tools, as it anticipated subsequent developments by prefiguring the visual obsession of the century. Pantoscopes, present in the squares of Europe, they had repertoires of views variously animated by simple but suggestive light effects, observable from the eyepieces inside the magical 'cassele'. The zogroscope was a very simple instrument for observing optical views, equipped with a magnifying glass and a 45 ° reflecting mirror. The image was positioned upside down at the base and observed through the large convex lens in the mirror, where it could be seen straight, enlarged and three-dimensional. There was something evidently paradoxical in the artifice, as the result was of little effect compared to the direct vision of the image. His suggestion was therefore linked to the fact of "looking through", to the charm of a vision in which an instrument was placed between the gaze and its object. The zogroscope would therefore seem more a product of the omnivorous observation curiosity typical of the time; in this case, looking became a practice largely free from its object, fun in and of itself, by virtue of the interposition of the instrument, which charged this mediated vision with a power of suggestion superior to that of direct vision, while the The psychic condition of the beholder was changing due to the presence of the tool which made it more engaging and full of expectations.

The popular publishing, which reworked the most illustrious models mentioned and found in the world of childhood a new privileged reference, supported this passion for self-taught scientific entertainment that spread in the nineteenth century. The association of play and sport often became an educational vehicle in the various branches of physics: in Philosophy in sport made science in earnest by John Ayrton Paris (1785-1856), president of the Royal College of Physician, who appeared in 1827 and was continually republished in the following decades, the author declared the programmatic intent to "instill in young minds the basic principles of natural philosophy with the help of popular games and youth sports". The large chapter dedicated to optics described all the games based on the phenomenon of retinal persistence, including Joseph-Antoine Ferdinand Plateau's phenachistoscope (1801-1883) and the thaumatropium, created by the same author. Based on the education-delight combination of the eighteenth-century matrix, the rich nineteenth-century scientific publishing production, of a popular nature, found another exemplary text of its spirit and structural characteristics at the end of the century in the treatise of Gaston Tissandier (1843-1899) from emblematic title Les récréations scientifiques, ou l'enseignement par les jeux (1881). In his brief introduction, the author refers to the seventeenth-century treatise by Jacques Ozanam (1640-1717), the first to introduce and apply scientific term the lucky term récréations, dear to 19th century science communicators. Tissandier accuses the illustrious predecessor of lightness in including even "the games of the bussolotti and dexterity" in the field of science, and in dealing with the games of "delightful physics", which are nothing but "ingenious superchierie", stating the method of the experiments described in his work is rigorously scientific, although it was also proposed "for the purpose of educating while having fun" (trad. it. 1882). According to the author, the optical experiences described had the advantage of being able to be realized with elementary instruments, which anyone could have built. Tissandier offers the catalog of the most popular optical games of the 19th century. starting from the simplest: discs and color tops, stroboscopic discs, all the instruments based on the phenomenon of retinal persistence, from the thaumatropium to Plateau's phenachistoscope, from the zootrope to the praxinoscope-theater of Émile Reynaud (1844-1918), up to the deforming mirrors, prisms and anamorphoses. In this way an explanation of the phenomena and devices designed to verify them is carried out with didactic clarity, and the report of experiences that seemed to border on the field of pure entertainment is also offered. The "decapitated speaking" experiment, carried out with the simple use of two 45 ° mirrors, appears exemplary in this sense: "A few years ago, the speaking decapitated obtained in Paris and in a large number of other cities a real success of curiosity. Visitors looked into a room where they could not penetrate, and where they saw a three-footed table; above this table there was a human head, resting on a cloth in the middle of a tray. This head widened its eyes and spoke; it certainly belonged to a man whose body was absolutely disguised ... If a stone had been thrown between the feet of the table, the mirrors reflecting the walls on the right and left would have broken. An unbeliever made use of this process one day "(trad. It. 1882, pp. 171-72). Furthermore, Tissandier describes in a particularly suggestive way some effects of apparitions produced by transparent glasses, which were part of the rich and multifaceted strand nineteenth-century macabre and phantasmatic, and are attested by numerous iconographic repertoires. The study of the mechanisms of the moving image in the 19th century. it implies the need to follow the evolution of the magic lantern, the optical machine that fascinated scientists and technicians since the seventeenth century, engaging them in the development and improvement of increasingly sophisticated models, devices and animation modes. The story of these technical advances and of the varying and diversifying of the iconographic trends is rich and fascinating and unfolds through scientific treatises, from the "magic or thaumaturgical lantern" by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), in the Ars magna lucis et umbrae ( 1646), until the dissolving views of the nineteenth-century manuals. With its role as an eminently spectacular optical artifice, in the eighteenth century the magic lantern enjoyed the highest consideration in the scientific field and was repeatedly the subject of academic dissertation. Samuel Urlsperger and Georg Erich Remmelin presented a doctoral thesis on the magic lantern in Tübingen in 1705, prefiguring the possibility of a didactic use of the instrument to illustrate subjects of natural history, history and sacred history, geography and mathematics (Phaenomena laternae magicae, 1705) . In June 1713, Samuel Joannes Rhanaeus presented the Novum et curiosum laternae magicae augmentum quod dissertatione mathematica to Jena. After a historical introduction aimed at affirming the dignity of the topic, appealing to the prestige of authoritative scientists and describing their research and the results achieved in the improvement of the magic lantern, the author proposed the first description of some animated projection glasses, designed and manufactured by himself, minutely illustrating their mechanisms and effects.

In the same physics course that WJS's Gravesande published in Leiden in 1720-21, the magic lantern was recognized as the protagonist of the many reflex reflector machines used "to show useful and pleasant shows". The treatise is of fundamental importance as it offers the most accurate technical description of the structure and use of the instrument at that date: description followed and taken up by successive authors without particular modifications. Regarding the glasses, the author notes that "the subjects must be represented on a flat glass and painted with delicate colors" (col. I, p. 873), they can be formed by round glass disks, with a diameter of five inches , fixed three by three in wooden frames; or the figures are painted in succession on glass bands, also

At the end of the eighteenth century the techniques of image animation and the relative repertoires for the magic lantern were diffused in Europe through the popular work of EG Guyot, which testified to the different quality levels already existing in the production of images for magic lantern: on the one hand the most common one of the glass intended for popular use, used in the squares by the numerous itinerant lanternists, on the other the more sophisticated one of the images reserved for collecting and therefore for the domestic entertainment of a cultured and refined public. The ludic vein flanked the fantastic one: a section of the treatise of 's Gravesande, in fact, was dedicated to the projections on the smoke and the suggestive ghostly apparitions that this technique allowed to evoke,

The slides of the fantastic vein perpetuated the nightmares of the popular and religious imagination finding in the magic lantern a technical improvement with respect to the attempts to arouse spectra and apparitions with the use of parabolic mirrors, as well as with respect to the macabre iconography, mostly attributable to the environment religious, of the first lantern-scientists of the second half of the seventeenth century. This repertoire was not typical of the itinerant show: those who proposed it, showmen who can be placed in the borderland between science and magic, were complex and ambiguous figures and, in the eyes of the public of the time, at least as mysterious as their own artifices. Étienne-Gaspard Robertson (1763-1837), aeronaut physicist, is among these the most complex. In the Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques (1831-1833) emerges its rich culture that mixed the most diverse suggestions: Giovan Battista Della Porta and Athanasius Kircher, Cagliostro, black magic and spiritism, the spectacular tradition of the magic lantern, the shadow theater of Dominique François Séraphin (1747-1800), but also the texts and practices of the new experimental physics. As a physicist he proposed experiences that ranged from chemistry to electricity and pneumatics, from pyrotechnics to areostatics. Attracted on one side by the world of magic and the occult, Robertson was equally enthusiastic about the achievements of science, of which he was passionate supporter and of which he exalted precisely, in apparent contradiction with his love for the irrational, the merit of having brought back realities that appeared prodigious and supernatural to rationally understandable causes, clearing the mists of credulity and superstition. A rich apparatus of scenographic artifacts and spectacular acoustic and light effects, which combined with the simultaneous projections obtained with fantascopes and magic lanterns, enhanced his representations in a sort of total show, orchestrated and directed by himself. The fantascope was patented by Robertson on March 27, 1799: it was a technically perfected magic lantern, for the construction of which he had used great technicians such as the London optician Peter Dollond for the optical part and the Parisian Pierre François Antoine Molteni for the body of the lantern, also adopting, to enhance lighting, the lamp invented in 1780 by Aimé Argand (1750-1803). Mounted on a mobile trolley, equipped with rubber-coated wheels to cushion its noise, it was placed behind a transparent screen to project without being visible to the spectators, and moved back and forth to reduce and magnify the images painted on glass, fixed or animated, making them approach, move away or disappear suddenly.

Philip Carpenter (1776-1833), the most important English manufacturer of lanterns and optical instruments of the beginning of the century, active first in Birmingham and later in London on Regent Street, patented in 1820 his simplified and portable version of the phantom scope, the lantern Phantasmagoria, designed to be used both as a simple magic lantern and for phantasmagoria shows.Henry Langdon Childe (1781-1874), who began his career just as a glass painter for Philipsthal's phantasmagorias, was the other great protagonist of the phantasmagoria and more generally of all the technical experimentation linked to the image projected during the 19th century. An article in "The optical magic lantern journal" (April 1894, 59, pp. 69-70) proposed the meticulous account of a well-known series of glasses of his production,

In the last decades of the 19th century. the macabre vein was almost entirely supplanted by the didactic and moralistic repertoires and then moved to the playful territory, in the vast production of playful glasses, where the images appeared stripped of any horrifying connotation: this is the case of the skeleton, whose dance, obtained thanks with a slide or a crank, it almost always ended up breaking down into a thousand pieces like a harmless toy. A playful little skeleton was also the protagonist of one of the most famous and technically significant magical lantern mechanisms of the Victorian age, the band choreutoscope, invented by the Englishman Lionel Smith Beale (1828-1906) in 1866 and perfected by William Charles Hughes in 1884:

Even fading, later widely used in cinema, was a technique that allowed to create particularly suggestive image animation effects. Childe experimented and developed it probably between September 1836 and February 1837. The invention, which represented the most suggestive and advanced image projection technique, had an important contribution in the work of Ph. Carpenter who, in 1821 , created the first method of mechanical reproduction of the image on glass: the copper-plate sliders, which made possible the serial production of the same subject, while ensuring good quality and accuracy in the drawing. In these years a real industry was born capable of placing on the market images of the most varied repertoires at relatively low costs. Basically the Carpenter technique consisted in the hot impression of a subject on the glass by a copper incision: the contours were thus fixed and then moved on to the delicate phase of coloring. The scientific and didactic repertoire benefited to a large extent from new production techniques. The first series of copper-plate sliders produced by Carpenter, a set of eighteen plates, was dedicated to natural history. Their success meant that in 1823 Carpenter published his Elements of zoology as an accompanying manual to the new series, which included fifty-six slides, distributed according to the Linnaeus system in the different classes of mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms. the outlines were thus fixed and then moved on to the delicate phase of coloring. The scientific and didactic repertoire benefited to a large extent from new production techniques. The first series of copper-plate sliders produced by Carpenter, a set of eighteen plates, was dedicated to natural history. Their success meant that in 1823 Carpenter published his Elements of zoology as an accompanying manual to the new series, which included fifty-six slides, distributed according to the Linnaeus system in the different classes of mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms. the outlines were thus fixed and then moved on to the delicate phase of coloring. The scientific and didactic repertoire benefited to a large extent from new production techniques. The first series of copper-plate sliders produced by Carpenter, a set of eighteen plates, was dedicated to natural history. Their success meant that in 1823 Carpenter published his Elements of zoology as an accompanying manual to the new series, which included fifty-six slides, distributed according to the Linnaeus system in the different classes of mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms. a set of eighteen slabs was dedicated to natural history. Their success meant that in 1823 Carpenter published his Elements of zoology as an accompanying manual to the new series, which included fifty-six slides, distributed according to the Linnaeus system in the different classes of mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms. a set of eighteen slabs was dedicated to natural history. Their success meant that in 1823 Carpenter published his Elements of zoology as an accompanying manual to the new series, which included fifty-six slides, distributed according to the Linnaeus system in the different classes of mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms.

Since 1820, developments in the photographic technique, a determining element in the birth of cinema, have undergone a series of research and acquisitions, sometimes even random, by scientists and artists of different backgrounds and backgrounds. Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce (1765-1833) made the first heliography, a positive image on a metal support, not reproducible, in 1822; in 1833, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (c. 1787-1851) developed a system for fixing the photographic image on silver plates treated with iodine vapors and exposed to light in a dark room. In 1835 William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) carried out the modern procedure of negative-positive photographic reproduction. The search to perfect the machines and shorten the exposure times continued in the following decades, while photography spread as a collective passion becoming an industry, laboratories and shooting studios multiplied and production extended and specialized to encompass every field of visible reality. The birth of new forms of entertainment was connected to the use in the their scope of photography and, with the increase in the possibility of reproducing the image that derived from it, the repertoire of traditional shows increased dramatically with a production of stereoscopic views on paper and glass, projection positives, animated photographs intended to observation by optical instruments. Scottish scientist David Brewster (1781-1868) built the stereoscope in 1844, one of the most popular optical machines in the Victorian era, based on the three-dimensional effects produced by binocular vision. The apparatus was equipped with lenses through which two identical photographic images could be observed, one with the right eye and the other with the left; simultaneously seen converged into a single virtual image, which by virtue of the binocular vision was perceived in relief. The models of the nineteenth-century stereoscopes varied widely: from a simpler hand-held, portable type, equipped with lenses and an image-holder frame, to elaborate column viewers, finely decorated and painted, inside which they could be observed, rotating the external side knobs, dozens and dozens of photographs: an instrument similar to the eighteenth-century worlds both for the type of use, based on the "look inside" mode,

The aletoscope was patented in 1861 by the photographer Carlo Ponti (1822 / 24-1893) and used to observe specially prepared photographs (colored, perforated and placed on a curved frame), in order to create day and night effects, depending on whether the vision was in transparency or reflected light, by means of two side mirrors.What contributed significantly to the enormous development of the animated image market starting from 1860 was the introduction of photographic plates for magic lantern, which ended up replacing the painted ones by hand. The American Lorenzo J. Marcy in 1872 started marketing a new model of magic lantern, the Sciopticon, equipped with a more elaborate optical system than the previous ones, with double condenser and paraffin lighting; the photographic plates were in fact affirmed on the market in a massive way, with a vast didactic and recreational repertoire. Starting from 1880 ca. a moralizing production was imposed: the mechanical glass and the fading gradually gave way to the new extremely successful repertoire of lifemodels or living pictures, black and white photographic stories, subsequently hand-colored, composed of series of images in sequence, with models living taken on the background of scenarios painted or reconstructed in the studio. This production and the first results of cinema were connected on the technical level of the ways of representation, and on that of the thematic contents and purposes. Many anonymous actors began their careers in the photographic studios of the main specialized London companies, and then ended up on the set of the first cinematographic films. The period between 1877, the year in which for the first time Eadweard Muybridge (pseudonym of Edward James Muggeridge, 1830-1904) carried out his studies on the analysis of movement, and the presentation to the public of the Cinématographe Lumière in Paris on December 28, 1895, constituted a fundamental research phase characterized by inventions that prepared the way for the new vision system and of which the studies and tools of Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) constituted the fundamental stages. In 1879 Muybridge created the first projection of moving images with the zoopraxiscope, presenting his device for the first time in Europe in 1881, at the Paris studio of Marey. The photographer publicized his research with a conference-demonstration tour in America and Europe. Physiologist Marey, enthusiastic about the new techniques of photographic analysis of movement, perceived the scientific insufficiency of the method and in 1882 developed the photographic rifle, which allowed the shooting of twelve consecutive photographs on a circular plate that turned automatically in jerks. Dissatisfied with this instrument, as the images appeared as black silhouettes against the light, unsuitable for an analysis of animal movement, Marey was later able to take a decisive step forward with the chronophotographer, who perfected in 1888, replacing the glass plate with the George Eastman (1854-1932) and obtaining the first chronophotographs on a single strip. Eastman and Henry M. Reichenbach patented the film with celluloid support with lateral perforation in 1889. In 1891 Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), who had noticed the advantages of celluloid film, patented the kinetoscope, presenting it to the public in May 1893 (the first pay room for kinetoscope shows was opened in New York in 1894). Among the studies and tools developed by other scientists and photographers variously engaged in the identification of new principles and in the realization of new technical achievements, mention should be made of the electrotachiscope of Ottomar Anschütz (1846-1907), perfected in 1890, the phonoscope of Georges Demeny (1850-1917), Marey's assistant, 1891, Herman Casler's mutoscope, built in 1894 on the principle of Linnet's cinematographer. English publishing produced a series of detailed and exhaustive technical manuals on the use of the optical lantern, equipped with rich illustrative apparatuses. It has been observed that "this catalog, destined to be rapidly supplanted by cinema, is a macroscopic demonstration of the progressive development of the project of visual domination of all possible realities. Photography allows a definition of places which no viewer had ever been able to to offer and above all there is no longer a hierarchy of importance within the visible. Everything falls right into the field of the visible and is promoted to be the object of privileged observation "(GP Brunetta, Il viaggio dell'icononauta, 1997, p. 15) . use of the optical lantern, equipped with rich illustrative apparatus. It has been observed that "this catalog, destined to be rapidly supplanted by cinema, is a macroscopic demonstration of the progressive development of the project of visual domination of all possible realities. Photography allows a definition of places which no viewer had ever been able to to offer and above all there is no longer a hierarchy of importance within the visible. Everything falls right into the field of the visible and is promoted to be the object of privileged observation "(GP Brunetta, Il viaggio dell'icononauta, 1997, p. 15) . use of the optical lantern, equipped with rich illustrative apparatus. It has been observed that "this catalog, destined to be rapidly supplanted by cinema, is a macroscopic demonstration of the progressive development of the project of visual domination of all possible realities. Photography allows a definition of places which no viewer had ever been able to to offer and above all there is no longer a hierarchy of importance within the visible. Everything falls right into the field of the visible and is promoted to be the object of privileged observation "(GP Brunetta, Il viaggio dell'icononauta, 1997, p. 15) . it is a macroscopic demonstration of the progressive development of the visual domain project of all possible realities. Photography allows a definition of places that no landscape artist had ever been able to offer and above all there is no longer a hierarchy of importance within the visible. Everything falls right into the field of the visible and is promoted to be the object of privileged observation "(GP Brunetta, Il viaggio dell'icononauta, 1997, p. 15). it is a macroscopic demonstration of the progressive development of the visual domain project of all possible realities. Photography allows a definition of places that no landscape artist had ever been able to offer and above all there is no longer a hierarchy of importance within the visible. Everything falls right into the field of the visible and is promoted to be the object of privileged observation "(GP Brunetta, Il viaggio dell'icononauta, 1997, p. 15).

In 1887 the monthly publications of the "Optical magic lantern journal and photographic enlarger" began, in order to update the large audience of professionals on the continuous patents and technical discoveries, on their authors and production laboratories. The magic lantern, which became optical, was increasingly configured as an information tool capable of reaching ever wider audiences, creating a knowledge and a common iconographic patrimony, which managed to bring the most diverse audiences closer together.

Many optical devices of the 19th century. they represented a simplification of the machines used in the spectacular practice of the previous century, but most of the most widespread mechanisms and games were based instead on the principle of persistence of the retinal image: it was in fact from the third decade of the 19th century. that the research on this phenomenon, which had illustrious antecedents in I. Newton and even in Claudius Ptolemy (100 ca.-170 ca.), gave rise to a series of optical amusements that would soon become very popular, enjoying an extraordinary commercial success .

In the chronological span of about seventy years of studies on the physiological principles of vision and in particular on the perception of movement, conducted by scientists from different countries, often active in full solitude, without contacts and connections, there was a rapid succession of new devices , each of which represented an improvement and advancement compared to the previous one on the road of the animation of the image that would have led to the invention of the cinema. The English physician and mathematician Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) presented his experiments on the "curious optical illusion" produced by the movement of advance and rotation of a wheel on its axis, observed through special slots, to the Royal Society of London. Starting from Roget's experiment and by replacing the slits with an intermittent light, the physicist Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) studied and described the stroboscopic effect in 1827: intermittent lighting allowed to block the movement of a body by breaking it down into a series of fixed instants ("Quarterly journal of science", 1827, 1, p. 351). Even the Englishman Michael Faraday (1791-1867) attempted, towards 1830, to stop the movement by carrying out the well-known experiment: observing a spinning cardboard gear wheel reflected in a mirror, the image was perceived as perfectly static. The studies then concentrated both on the rendering of the animation of still images and on the decomposition of the movement. Well richer in consequences in terms of invention of new optical devices for playful or spectacular use was the study of retinal persistence. William Henry Fitton (1780-1861) and JA Paris competed in 1825 for the primacy of the invention of the thaumatropium, a cardboard disc that had two complementary figures on both sides, which overlapped forming a single image obtained by the rapid rotation on the own axis. The experiment was received with enormous interest by the scientific world and, using a repertoire of playful images, among which the then well-known bird in a cage, became a very popular game.J.-AF Plateau in 1829 discussed an important thesis at the University of Liège on the persistence of bright impressions on the retina; in 1832, who became a professor of physics at the University of Ghent, he developed the phenachistoscope, a rotating disk which, reflected in a mirror and observed through a small slit, created the movement of a sequence of images arranged circularly on one face of the disk itself (Sur un nouveau genre d'illusion d'optique , in "Correspondance mathématique et physique de l'observatoire de Bruxelles", 1832, 7, pp. 365-68). Less well-known and fortunate devices were the cinestiscope (1853) of the Austrian Franz Freiher von Uchatius (1811-1881), which allowed the projection on screen, through a magic lantern, of two disks, one with images painted on glass, the other equipped with slots such as the phenachistoscope, operated synchronously; or Henry Renno Heyl's fasmatropium (1870), a projection phalakistoscope perfected with respect to von Uchatius's device, which allowed to animate a series of eighteen photographs on glass through an intermittent rotation movement and a shutter. The Englishman John Linnet patented the cineographer in 1868, which became one of the most popular children's games: a small block of paper consisting of a series of pieces of paper, each of which carried only one phase of a certain movement, the sequence of which could be reconstructed by fast scrolling, so as to obtain a movement accomplished with the animation of a considerable number of images. The praxinoscope, one of the most complex and suggestive optical machines on the spectacular plane, was developed in 1877 by É. Reynaud: it was a variant of the zootrope of William George Horner (1786-1837), of which he maintained the structure, replacing the slots with a polygonal prism located in the center of the cylinder. The new process produced a smoother movement and greater image brightness. The optical machines subsequently created by Reynaud were based on the same principle: in the praxinoscope-theater (1879) the animated image was integrated by a fixed theatrical backdrop; the projection praxinoscope (1880), applied to the magic lantern and perfected in 1888 with the optical theater, was a real show machine with a rather complex operation, which allowed to offer the public projections of a few minutes with animated images on different backgrounds . Between 1892 and 1895 Reynaud staged his luminous pantomimes daily at the Musée Grévin in Paris with great public success, until the first of the Lumière of March 22, 1895 which marked the point of arrival and connection, but it would be more correct to speak of a fundamental stage, of all the experiments hitherto carried out in the search, almost manic, of animation devices always more elaborate. An evolutionary path whose complete picture must necessarily also include research and discoveries in the field of photography, materials science and lighting technology of those years.BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cited texts:

A. Kircher , Ars magna lucis et umbrae in decem libros digesta. Quibus admirandae lucis et umbrae in mundo, atque adeo universa natura, vires effectusque uti nova, ita varia novorum reconditiorumque speciminum exhibitione, ad varios mortalium usus, pandantur , Romae 1646.

J. Ozanam , Récréations mathématiques et physiques qui contiennent plusieurs problèmes d'arithmétique […], Paris 1694 ( Recreations in mathematics and natural philosophy: containing amusing dissertations and inquiries concerning a variety of subjects the most remark-able and proper to excite curiosity and attention to the whole range of the mathematical and philosophical sciences, translated into English by Charles Hutton , 4 vols., London 1803).

S. Urlsperger, GE Remmelin , Phaenomena laternae magicae ad stateram expensae dissertatione academica per principium isodynamicum explicata [...] praeside Johanne Cunrado Creilingio [...] publicae ventilationlica exposita to Samuele Urlspergero et Georgio Erico Remmelino , Tubingae 1705.

SJ Rhanaeus , Novum et curiosum laternae magicae augmentum, quod dissertatione mathematica [...] sub praesidio M. Bonifacii Henrici Ehrenbergeri , [...] publico doctorum examini exponit Samuel Joannes Rhanaeus , Ienae 1713.

WJS's Gravesande , Physices elementa mathematica experimentis confirmata, sive Introductio ad philosophiam newtonianam , lib. V, in particular Postal Code. XVII, De Lucerna Magica , pp. 873 et seq., Lugduni Batavorum 1720-21.

F. Algarotti , Newtonianism for ladies, or Dialogues over light and colors , dial. III, Naples 1737.

JA Nollet , Leçons de physique expérimentale , 6 vols., Paris 1743-1748.

EG Guyot , Nouvelles récréations physiques et mathématiques, contenant, toutes celles qui ont été décovertes & imaginées dans ces derniers temps, sur l'Aimant, les Nombres, l'Optique, la Chymie, & c., & Quantité d'autres qui n ' ont jamais été rendues publiques , 4 vols., Paris 1769-70.

JA Nollet , L'Art des expériences ou Avis aux amateurs de la physique, sur le choix, la cons-truction et l'usage des instruments, sur la preparation et l'emploi des drogues qui servent aux expériences , 3 vols., Paris 1770 (trad. it. The art of experiences; work that serves as a continuation and fulfillment for him Lessons in experimental physics , 4 vols., Venice 1783).

JA Sigaud de la Fond , Description et usage d'un cabinet de physique expérimentale , 2 vols., Paris 1775.

JA Paris , Philosophy in sport made science in earnest; being an attempt to illustrate the first principles of natural philosophy by the aid of popular toys and sports , 3 vols., London 1827.

É.-G. Robertson , Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques du physicien-aéronaute É.-G. Robertson , 2 vols., Paris 1831-1833.

G. Tissandier , Les récréations scientifiques, ou l'enseignement par les jeux , Paris 1881 (trad. It., Milan 1882).

Among the stories:

G.-M. Coissac , Histoire du cinématographe de ses origines à nos jours , Paris 1925.

G. Sadoul , Histoire générale du cinéma , 1er vol., L'invention du cinéma, 1832-1897 , Paris 1948, édition revue et augmentée (1ère éd. 1946; trad. It. Torino 1965).

J. Mitry , Histoire du cinéma , 1er vol., 1895-1914, art et industrie , Paris 1967.

On Code D (sheet 8 recto A), 1485-1490:

F. Bevilacqua, MG Ianniello , Optics from its origins to the beginning of the 18th century , Turin 1982.

Among the main seventeenth-century scientific treatises:

J.-F. Niceron , La perspective curieuse ou Magie artificielle des effets merveilleux de l'otique, par la vision directe, la catoptrique, par la réflexion des miroirs plats, cylindriques et Conques, la dioptrique, par la réfraction des crystaux , Paris 1638.

M. Bettini , Apiaria universae philosophiae mathematicae, in quibus paradoxa, et nova pleraque machinamenta ad usus eximios traducta, & facillimis demonstrationibus confirmata [...] Accessit ad finem secundi tomi Euclides applicatus et conditus ex apiariis , 2 vols., Bononiae 1642.

J. Du Breuil , La perspective practique , 3 vols., Paris 1642-1649.

C. Schott , Magia universalis naturae et artis, sive, Recondita naturalum & artificialium rerum scientia […] Opus quadripartitum , 4 vols., Herbipoli 1657-1659.

A. Tacquet , Opera mathematica […], Antverpiae 1669.

Among the numerous studies dedicated to anamorphosis:

J. Baltrušaitis , Anamorphoses ou magie artificielle des effects merveilleux , nouv. éd., Paris 1969 (1ère éd. 1955; trad. it. Milan 1978).

F. Leeman , Anamorfosen. Eenspel met waarneming, schijn en werkelijkheid , Amsterdam 1975.

E. Battisti et al. , Anamorphosis. Evasion and Return , introduction by J. Baltrušaitis, Rome 1981.

On the mirrors:

J. Baltrušaitis , Le miroir. Essai sur une légende scientifique; révélations, science-fiction et fallacies , Paris 1978 (trad. it. Milan 1981).

Fallit Imago. Mechanisms, fascinations and deceptions of the mirror , edited by B. Bandini, D. Baroncelli, Ravenna 1984.

On the spectacularization of science:

G. L'Estrange Turner , Scientific instruments and experimental philosophy 1550-1850 , Aldershot-Brookfield 1990.

RE Rider , El experimento como espectáculo , in La ciencia y su público. Perspectivas históricas , edited by J. Ordoñez, A. Elena, Madrid 1990, pp. 113-46.

D. Raichvarg , Science et spectacle, figures d'une rencontre , Nice 1993.

On the attribution of the polemoscope to Hevelius:

M.-J. Brisson , Traité élémentaire ou principes de physique, fondés sur les connaissances les plus certaines, tant anciennes que modernes, & confirmés par l'expérience , 2 ° vol., Paris 1797², p. 326 (1st éd. 1789).

J.-E. Montucla , Histoire des mathématiques […], nouv. éd., Paris 1799-1802, book III, p. 566 (1st éd. 1758).

About Kircher:

Encyclopaedism in Baroque Rome. Athanasius Kircher and the Museo del Collegio Romano between Wunderkammer and scientific museum , curated by M. Casciato, MG Ianniello, M. Vitale, Venice 1986.

Athanasius Kircher. The World Museum , edited by E. Lo Sardo, Rome 2001 (exhibition catalog).

On the figure and work of Robertson:

F. Levie , Étienne-Gaspard Robertson. La vie d'un fantasmorge , Brussels 1990.

On the figure and the work of Carpenter:

H. Bollaert , Phantasmagoria , in "The new magic lantern journal", 1983, 3, pp. 9-11.

J. Barnes , Philip Carpenter , in "The new magic lantern journal", 1986, 2, pp. 8-11.

D. Henry , Carpenter & Westley , in "The new magic lantern journal", 1986, 1, pp. 8-10.

On the studies that led to the animation of the image:

FP Liesegang , Zahlen und Quellen zur Geschichte der Projektionskunst und Kinematographie , Berlin 1926.

H. Bollaert , Optical toys and the development of the projected image , in "The new magic lantern journal", April 1986, 1-3, pp. 36-43.

V. Pinel , Chronologie commentée de l'Invention du Cinéma , Paris 1992.

For an in-depth analysis of Plateau's research:

D. Robinson , Masterpieces of animation , in "Griffithiana", December 1991, 43.

[ بازدید : 56 ] [ امتیاز : 0 ] [ نظر شما : ]