Thursday, December 8, 2016

Optical Box (1750-1790)



This optical box from the Museum of Cinema in Catalonia dates from the late 18th century. (Link to YouTube video).  

It had multiple functions: You could use it as a camera obscura for drawing. Besides this, it could be folded up into the shape of a book and easily transported.


Or it could be set up like for viewing theatrical dioramas, kind of an ancestor of Disney's multiplane camera.

3 comments:

  1. Wow! This is very cool. Clement would have a lot of fun with this!
    This reminds me of an old ‘Lucy-graph’ I used to have, very similar, but it projected a 3d object in the box up onto a sheet of glass for tracing. If that Lucy (made around 1940’s) was designed as well as this optical box (and could double as a Camera Obscura) I might have kept the old dinosaur around. -RQ

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I've seen the folding camera-in-book design before (Joshua Reynolds had one), if not one that doubled as a scenographic viewer, but it's nice to see one being unfolded as we see in the video. It would appear to be an enligenment era "amusement" more than a serous artist's tool. The aperture they show is way too small for practical viewing of a projection and the schematic drawing they show is from the 19th century (French), and shows a meniscus lens (convex on one side, and concave on the other), which was a important nineteenth century improvement that gave better edge to edge focus, a problem that plagued previous camera obscuras.

    ReplyDelete

Due to a high level of spam we must moderate comments. Please identify yourself by name or social media handle so we know you're not a 'bot.'