Tag: glasses
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The history of eyeglasses
Efforts to improve vision date back to the ancient civilizations of India and China. Greek scholars such as Ptolemy and Euclid endeavored to understand the physics of light refraction, the mechanisms of lenses, and how their properties can enhance vision and literacy. The Romans magnified the letters they were looking at by placing reading stones…
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Spectacle seller
In an often repeated theme, Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685), painter of the Dutch Golden Age, presents a spectacle seller. He offers his wares to an older woman, watched by a child or perhaps an apprentice of the seller. As we can see in his hands, the spectacles are without temples to rest on the ear…
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Portraits of vision: Sir Joshua Reynolds
Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States The subject of this portrait wears wiry, diminutive round spectacles, lending a distinctly pedantic flair. Yet gazing out is none other than Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), one of the greatest English painters in history (fig. 1). Sir Joshua headed the Royal Academy of Painters for twenty-four years, and wielded enormous…