No More Learning

But every Egyptian pyramid shows - and this is the crucial point in Lacan's argument - how costly the preparation or maintenance of such holes can turn out to be. Millions of stones serve merely to encase a non-place. Lacan conceives of the invention of linear per- spective as a simple act of "economy. " Instead of building the sacred void, it is much cheaper to paint it as a vanishing point. This artistic innovation has an immediate influence on architecture, according to Lacan, because he conceives of early perspective painting as mural or wall painting rather than panel painting. In Assisi, for example, where the first pre-perspective paintings surfaced and were destroyed in last year's earthquake, murals cover the walls of buildings and thus give them vanishing points or holes that are not actually part of the structure, but are rather cheaper or more imaginary. I will later return to this combination of painting and architecture, like the baroque trompe l'oeil.
Unfortunately, Lacan did not know the history of Brunelleschi's hole pattern, which would have confirmed that all perspective paint- ing centers around a hole, and that there is a connection between architecture and painting. Not only is the object seen in Brunelleschi's image a work of architecture - namely, the Florence Baptistry - but it is also the prescribed place from which the illusion of perspec- tive solely becomes apparent - the Cathedral of Florence, as it was finally completed by Brunelleschi's brilliant achievement in dQme construction.
3The German word for transference, Ubertragung, also means "transmission," 59
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This leads me to the last point of this seemingly never ending com- mentary on a single image. It concerns the simple question of how Brunelleschi was able to paint his image at all. All of the answers to this question can only remain hypotheses, as Manetti himself did not write a single word about how the painting was done. Even Busch is succinct and resigned: "It is unknown precisely how the production of Brunelleschi's image panel was accomplished" (Busch, 1995, p. 402). However, Shigeru Tsuji, art historian at the Gedei (the Japanese abbreviation for the Imperial Art School of Tokyo), has presented a hypothesis that is so wonderfully plausible I can only endorse it.
Like all good detectives in crime novels, Tsuji begins with the facts in order to question why Brunelleschi chose precisely this image and no other. Why was his image so unusually small (approximately 27 centimeters square)? Why did he paint his image from the main portal of the cathedral? Why was the image obviously painted in reverse, such that only the use of a mirror would make it visually coincide with the reality of the Baptistry? The answer, which resolves all three of these questions at the same time, is that Brunelleschi employed a camera obscura. He was therefore the missing link between Roger Bacon in the fourteenth century and Leonardo da Vinci in the sixteenth.
First argument: in Brunelleschi's time there were no lenses. The perforated disk in front of the projected image thus had to be posi- tioned in a place that remained shaded even during the day. This is precisely true of the main portal of Santa Maria del Fiore.
Second argument: the object to be projected must itself lie in direct sunlight. This was precisely true of the Baptistry during the morning. Third argument: the projection surface must be a certain size. If it was too large the image would become dark and blurred, but if it was too small Brunelleschi's hands would not fit between the perforated disk and the projection surface. With the meticulous use of actual architectonic relationships in Florence and trigonometric functions, Tsuji elegandy shows that Brunelleschi's chosen image size was ideal
for his purposes.
Fourth argument: in Brunelleschi's time there were still no geomet-
ric devices that could manage to reverse pages automatically. In other words, a reversed image could hardly have been produced by hand in 1425. If Brunelleschi had painted by hand, he could have simply not used the mirror and instead turned the front of his painting towards the observer (rather than the back).
To me, at least, Tsuji's arguments are completely clear. An inven- tor of a process may thus have been identified only by means of cir- cumstantial evidence, a rare occurrence in the history of media. But
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TsuJi nghtly emphasizes that even if Brunelleschl actually Invented the camera obscura as a practical painting device, he did not solve all of the problems of linear perspective painting. The camera obscura only works in the real world. This was conclusively proven by its development into the photographic camera, which cannot record anything that does not exist. But the painters of the Quattrocento and the following centuries were very frequently ordered to paint what did not exist: God, saints, and the beauty of earthly rulers. The sImple questlOn for Brunelleschi's successors, therefore, was how to take the geometrical automatlsm of the camera obscura and transfer It to other media.
2. 1. 2. 2 Alberti
The only other medium that was possible at that time was paper, which reached Europe from China via Arabia to then revolutionize mathematics, science, and accounting. The problem was how to con- struct perspectival drawings on paper geometrically, especially when these drawings were pure fantasy or- in the case of new building plans - pure dreams of the future. This problem was first solved by a younger friend and pupil of Brunelleschi's, who attained fame as an engineer-artist and all-purpose inventor: Leon Battista Alberti.
Like Brunelleschi, Alberti certainly also used the magic of the dark- room to astonish the Florentine people. An anonymous biographer recounts beautifully:
Through painting itself he also produced things that were entirely
incredible and unbelievable to spectators, which could be seen through a small opening in a small box. There one caught sight of high moun- tains and broad landscapes surrounding an immeasurable lake as well as regions so distant that they could not be discerned with the eye. He called these things demonstrations, and they were meant to be seen as natural phenomena rather than paintings. There were two kinds, which he called day demonstrations and night demonstrations. In the latter, one could see Arcturus, the Pleiades, Orion, and other shimmer- ing stars, and the moon rose behind steep cliffs and mountain peaks by the light of the evening starSj in the day demonstrations the shining god was unveiled, who according to Homer was announced far and wide around the world by Eos, the bringer of morning. (quoted in Vasari, 1983, p. 347)
The camera obscura can hardly be defined more clearly: it is the sun cult, as for the Greeks - the return of the gods, the enemy of all
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Christianity. This was the reason why it was so important to spread the renewed unveiling of being in its entirety, which Helios and/or Alberti achieved, to the world outside Florence. Alberti takes up his pen - Gutenberg had not yet invented his art - and as a grateful pupil dedicates his Three Books about Painting to Brunelleschi - first in Italian in 1435 and in scholarly Latin the following year.
The first book of this treatise presents "unheard-of and never- before-seen arts and sciences," which are explicitly without ancient "teachers" (Alberti, 1966, p. 40). To describe linear perspective as a free geometric construction, Alberti developed the concept of an ideal or simply imagined window. This fenestra aperta could be con- sidered to be the ancestor of all those graphic user interfaces that have endowed computer screens with so-called windows for the past 20 years. Alberti's window - like Microsoft Windows - was natu- rally rectangular and could thus be easily broken down into smaller windows. As a model or metaphor for this scanning technique, which was his greatest invention, Alberti employed a semi-transparent veil divided into small rectangles using vertical and horizontal threads of canvas. It could thus be said that in Alberti's work Brunelleschi's single hole became a thousand-eyed Argos. Indeed: Alberti, and later also Diirer, assigned the eye the task of looking through everyone of these countless holes into the world of either real models or ideal art objects.
Alberti's real trick, however, was to make even this activity of the eye as virtual as the concept of the window. To do this he used not canvas - the material hasis of all painting - but rather paper. The scanned rectangle was transferred out of the world and onto the paper, where it appeared as a checkered pattern, so to speak. This pattern then allowed geometrical constructions to be performed - in other words, operations with Diirer's ruler and compass - to such a high degree of accuracy that the resulting drawing obeyed all the laws of linear perspective. Alberti explicitly emphasized that he had written his treatise for artists and not for mathematicians, which is already clear from the title. For this reason, as I have implied, the applied mathematics still adhered to the good old Euclidean propor- tions between lines and angles. In other words, it did not look for help from the new trigonometric tables. Even more gratifying and enigmatic is the historical fact that Regiomontanus, the creator of the best trigonometric tables, undertook a trip to Italy, and during this trip - in Ferrara - he reportedly met Alberti. I would be a happier man if I knew what they had talked about.
Not knowing this is one of the reasons why a simple histori- cal question cannot be completely clarified: what was the practical
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cause of this radical shjft in the fifteenth century - from the two- dimensional miniature to the perspective panel, from the pictorial nature of all God's creatures to the mechanics of the camera obscura?
It hardly needs explaining why it was necessary to learn to see in perspective when shooting, whose invention I previously alluded to. The reason why it was necessary for painters to learn to see in perspective following Brunelleschi's experiment, however, was previ- ously attributed by art historians to a Stilwillen - or "will to style" - that simply led to the new Renaissance art. A better explanation is already Implied by the fact that in the very beginning, experiments with the camera obscura could only be conducted in darkened yet otherwise normal-sized chambers or rooms, but they soon changed to become small, transportable boxes. (Consider the difference between literally fixed temples and transportable Bibles. ) Painters who had a camera obscura could thus "paint according to nature," as the lovely phrase goes, simply because the small, portable box allowed the light and everything it illuminated to be conveyed onto a surface, which the hand of the painter then only had to paint over. People have always painted according to nature in some way, just as when the puppeteers in Plato's allegory of the cave produced silhouettes of jugs and similar tools, but they have not always made the hands of the painter into dependent functions in an experimental procedure. As if anticipating Arnheim's theory of photography, on the other hand, the camera obscura combines for the first time the optical transmis- sion of information with the optical storage of information; the former function is already fully automatic, whereas the latter is still manual.
We will not dwell on this manual limitation, but rather we will stress that the number of drawings and images generated with the aid of a camera obscura is probably beyond the wildest dreams of a hermeneutic history of art. The benefits are obvious: the draw- ings that result from this union of optical receiver and human data sink, camera obscura and painter, naturally have a greater level of precision. This precision also became, as in Durer's work, a theme of triumphant and self-referential drawings, which then once again recorded (for educational purposes) how the painter captures the image of a woman on paper either through a lattice placed in the room or by way of a camera obscura. I will only point out here that it goes without saying that women were once more the subjects of such experiments, but since this is a media history and not a love story, I prefer to steer clear of my suspicions concerning the purpose
of the whole episode.
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As I said, we do not know whether Alberti spoke with Regio- montanus about trigonometry and linear perspective at the court of Ferrara, but we do know the content of another conversation that Alberti had in his old age. This conversation has come down to us from Alberti himself, and it gives unexpected information about the causes that drove the modernization of technical media in the middle of the fifteenth century. In 1462 or 1463 - we do not know exactly - Leon Battista Alberti took a stroll in, of all places, the Vatican gardens with, of all people, a certain Dato, who was by profession secret scribe to the Pope. I should explain that the field of encoding and decoding texts, which began in the ancient world, was to some degree neglected in the Middle Ages. Cryptographic specialists were only employed in the Vatican and by the Signoria in Venice, where modern diplomacy in general originated. Dato, with his absolutely appropriate name, whose plural is "data," was one of them.
Alberti opened the conversation quite differently. He said that while an hour of chatting was spent in the Vatican garden, the "man in Mainz" had probably made another dozen or hundred copies of a rare and irreplaceable manuscript of ancient knowledge by laying it under his printing press. In other words, Alberti explicitly saw himself as a contemporary of Gutenberg. Dato must have answered - no one knows for sure - that in spite of all the Gutenbergs of this world, cryptanalytic encoding, his own profession, unfortunately is and remains a lengthy process.
It seems to me that this complaint preyed on Alberti's mind. He immediately sat down, with a quill in hand naturally, and thought about how the process of encoding and decoding secret messages could be accelerated, just as Gutenberg's movable type had acceler- ated handwriting or made it entirely superfluous. What emerged was a treatise on ciphers, which continues to be the basis of all cryptogra- phy, even in the computer age, as David Kahn, the leading historian of cryptography, emphasizes.
Albert introduced two innovations. One, strictly according to Shannon, on the side of the sender, the othel; again strictly according to Shannon, on the side of the receiver. When Roman emperors like Caesar or Augustus encrypted their messages, they simply moved all the letters one or two places further along in the alphabet, although Augustus never mastered modulus mathematics and therefore did not code the last letter X as the letter A (Suetonious, 1979, pp. 39 and 102). It was quick but also easy to crack. Alberti transferred the principle of movable type from Gutenberg's printing press to cryptography. Whenever a letter was shifted alphabetically and then
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written down according to the code, the code itself also changed. The next letter to appear on the paper was shifted one additional place in comparison with the original text. This remains the basic principle of polyalphabetic ciphers today.
Alberti's innovation in the field of decryption was decidedly Guten- bergian. The printing press had already made it plain that in order to print normal texts many more E's were needed than, say, X's or Y's. A glance in any typesetter's case will confirm this. Alberti, like Edgar Allan Poe's X-ing a Paragrab, threw preCIsely thIS glance at texts encrypted in the old-fashioned, manual way and not through his polyalphabetic method. When there are far more Y's than E's in such a text, this means plamly and simply that the letter E has presumably been encrypted as Y. In other words, Alberti transferred the coldness of numbers to the sacred realm of everyday grammatical sense or semantics.
2. 1. 3 Impact
2. 1. 3. 1 Perspective and Letterpress
This long digression into the history of textual media should make one thing clear: Alberti mathematized old manual techniques like painting and writing, and at the very least he had explicitly made ref- erence to this modernization before Gutenberg. The question remains whether this reference before and to Gutenberg is not also true of Alberti's mathematization of painting. Busch cites a remarkable passage, though I have not been able to verify it. No less a person than Giorgio Vasari, the contemporary and biographer of all of these painters, wrote in his 1550 book Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects that "in the year 1457, when the very useful method of printing books was invented by Johann Guttenberg, a German, Leon Battista discovered something similar," albeit merely in the field of painting (Vasari, 1983, pp. 346-7). In an age of growing national pride, this was probably supposed to imply that Italy's technical achievements had caught up with Germany's.
Contemporaries thus already saw a connection between the art of artistic writing and the art of artistic perspective, ars artificialiter scribendi and perspectiva artificiosa. This supposition can be theoreti- cally substantiated.
The content of a medium, McLuhan decreed, is always another medium. All of the Renaissance drawings, which described how to build a camera obscura and how best to install it between the painter
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and the living object, were stored and passed down in books, particu- larly in textbooks. For the first, yet certainly not the last time, we are encountering something like a union of media: the printed book, on the one hand, and the drawing brought to a higher level of precision throngh the camera obscura or linear-perspectival geometry on the other. As soon as one recognizes that, the lowest common multiple of the two media becomes obvious. Through Gutenberg's invention it was possible for the first time that all of the copies of a book, or at least of an edition, presented the same text, the same printing errors, and the same page numbers. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote in a poem about Gutenberg, "How greatly this page here resembles a thousand other pages" (Enzensberger, 1976, p. 4). (Not to mention the uniformity of computer software, with which my lecture notes and the notes of countless others have been drawn up. )
Elizabeth Eisenstein very convincingly argues that the new, mechanically perfect reproducibility of the medium of handwriting also put competitive pressure on other manual arts. The reproducible book as such required illustrations that were equally as reproducible and exact - not to make readers or art lovers happy, but rather to store and transmit technical knowledge, the most shining example of which was the invention of the letterpress itself. Eisenstein directly connects the great upturn in technology, science, and engineering in Europe in the modern era with the availability of technical drawings, construction plans, and sketches, which looked the same in every printed copy simply because they were indestructible reproductions of a single original. As we know, the techniques of wood engrav- ing and copperplate etching, which were developed or perfected at that time, provided this reproducibility, whose lack in other cultures resulted in drawings showing more mistakes - or more noise - as they were copied from copies of copies, etc. But who or what ensured that the original was a correct reproduction of its original, which may have been a woman or the camera obscura itself? My supposition: scientifically based perspective and its technical implementation - in other words, none other than the camera obscura once again. Even though the camera obscura was not a camera in the sense of photog- raphy or film, and consequently it could not replace the manual work of drawing and painting, these handicrafts nevertheless fell under its scientific-technical control. When one realizes that in the centuries before Gutenberg's invention the operational secrets of all manual workers were always only communicated from master to jonrney- man, from generation to generation, and when one realizes that secrecy was so important and promising, that entire cults and rituals
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were erected around it (hke wrought-Iron work), one can appreci- ate what it means to be able to entrust building plans along with explanatory texts henceforth to the printed book. Real guild secrets were replaced by the knowledge of engineers, which was in principle also possibly autodidactic, and ritual guild secrets were replaced by the specially invented and complementary secrets of associations like the Freemasons, which made imaginary theories out of the former practices of masons.
Print technology made the autodidact possible - rhat IS the point upon whiCh everythmg depends. The book became a medium in which technical innovations as such could take place. They could be stored, shared, and even advanced with rhe help of technical drawings in the text. Models of a mill or a camera obscura are easier to understand than their so-called reality. This is rhe reason why the excursion into letterpress was not a digression, but rather it furnished the historical foundations for the astonishing and otherwise inexplicable fact that Europe, in contrast to other cultures, has produced one technical medium after another since the Renaissance. It can concisely be said that Gutenberg's letterpress made the techniques that superseded it - from photography to the computer - possible in the first place. It was the unique medium that set other media free. This is true for Diirer's age as well as today. Without specifications, manuals, and technical drawings new generations of computers would be an impossibility.
2. 1. 3. 2 The Self-Printing of Nature
There is evidence to support this hypothesis about the practical uses of linear perspective and the camera obscura. The first piece of evi- dence also brings up an important detail from rhe prehistory of pho- tography. Namely, the seventeenrh century had already attempted to eliminate the great handicap of the camera obscura, rhat is, the necessity of manually painting over the images that emerged. Anato- mists like Vesalius in Bologna or botanists like Gessner in Basel took on the epoch-making task of pouring everything knowable about the human body or the plant world into printer's ink and printing, which greatly increased the need for precise illustrations. From 1657 onwards, therefore, nature researchers have also experimented with the possibility of transferring the objects of their research onto paper without the mediation of a wood or copperplate engraver. A Dane named Walgenstein, who will soon be mentioned again in connec- tion with the lanterna magica, reportedly succeeded in preparing the leaves of plants so that an imprint of them could be made. At the
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start, the leaves were simply held in smoke until they were black euough to leave behind an impression, but later on the very same material employed in the printing of Gutenberg's letters was also employed to print objects, as the leaves were prepared with printer's ink. In any case, the images emerged in their natural size and witb all the detail, but unfortunately only relatively few Gutenberg leaves could be produced from one botanical leaf. After tbat, it was worn out and had to be replaced by another leaf. Such attempts at least show, as Eder has already emphasized in his lengthy and old History of Photography, the clear tendency to set technically reproducible scientific illustrations alongside technically reproducible type (Eder, 1978, p. 33) - not only, as Eder assumes, to save the high costs of copperplate and wood engravers, but also to be able to compete with the precision, and that means from that time on the scientific nature of reproductions. This clarifies the connection between perspective representation, the camera obscura, and Gutenberg technology. In short, we can say that leaves (of plants) became leaves (of books) - while plants of the field, forest, and meadow became the content of optical media.
2. 1. 3.
3 Europe's Colonial Power
The second piece of historical evidence is even more amusing or elo- quent, at least for people who do not suffer from political correctness. In his wonderful book, The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry, Samuel Edgerton also recounts the history of the Jesuits who invaded China in droves during the Ming Dynasty, starting around 1600, in order to preach their faith - and not without success. The reason why the missionaries belonged to the Jesuit Order of all people is still being considered today.
In Peking, Father Matteo Ricci and his successors started an enor- mous enlightenment campaign. They equipped their own library with scientific books, and would you believe it, 19 of these titles were about perspective (Edgerton, 1991, p. 261). Rather than educating the heathens, though, the Jesuits planned to convert them by produc- ing and distributing Christian images, which had already helped an otherwise very insensible theology to triumph in Central and South America. However, the Jesuit in the Vatican who was responsible made a bad mistake. He determined that the native draughtsmen and copperplate engravers who were supposed to translate the images of Christianity into the image universe of Chinese culture should not be trained in Peking itself, but rather in distant Japan (Edgerton,
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1991, p. 266). In other words, the 19 treatIses on perspective, from which the so-called natives could have learned to draw, were not available.
Thus it happened as it had to happen. In 1627, Father Johannes Adam Schall von Bell decided to send four ambitious volumes with "diagrams and explanations of curious machines from the Far West" to the printing presses in Peking (Edgerton, 1991, p. 271). The so-called Theatra Machinarum, a book genre that not coinciden- tally had flourished since the Renaissance, normally contained exact perspective copperplate or wood engravings of existing or merely fictional machines - sketches, therefore, which supposedly enabled the observer to successfully recreate three-dimensional machines from two-dimensional images. Schall's native, presumably Japanese, wood engravers accordingly went to work. They had the European books along with a Chinese translation of the texts directly in front of them, but they were nonetheless completely incapable of correctly copying the proportions in perspective.
Up until the first decades of the nineteenth century, imperial China continued to print these kinds of incorrect graphics in encyclopae- dias and scientific-technical manuals. You can imagine the results. China was the most technologically advanced country in the world during the Middle Ages, but it remained trapped in a state that made it very easy for the English and other European powers to defeat China in one war after another from 1840 onwards. Perhaps the lesson to be learned from this is that linear perspective was not simply an aesthetic or artistic shift in taste, but rather a thoroughly technical re-evaluation of all optical values, which was inconceiv- able without the corresponding mathematical qualifications, such as during the Ming and Manchu dynasties in China. In a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, which I will return to later, a "Chinaman" of all people poses the "stupid question": "How is it that objects grow smaller as they recede? " (Hoffmann, 1952, p. 77). Linear perspective remained one of the arcana of modern European power
until approximately 1850, when it once again reached Japan and elsewhere.
So much for linear perspective from the perspective of what Shannon calls the receiver side. The camera obscura captured light and cast it further, but it did not send it. For thousands of years, that was left entirely up to simple signal systems consisting of mirrors and torches, which would determine the outcome of battles. Long before Einstein's proof that the speed of light could not be surpassed, sol- diers already knew the advantage of rapid communication.
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2. 2 Lanterna Magica and the Age of the World Picture
The last task of this hrief history of art must therefore be to recount when, how, and why images also received a transmitting apparatus and thus learned how to be transmitted without the classical means of transportation provided by the postal system. The transmitting appa- ratus was a technical but not a historical twin of the camera obscura, and it went by the lovely name lanterna magica or "magic lantern. "
In essence, the lanterna magica simply turns the camera obscura inside out. A hole in a wall once again separates inside and outside, system and environment. But in place of the sun, which in the camera obscura transmits images from the environment into the system, the lanterna magica employs an artificial light source in the interior of the system, such as a simple candle. Using either front or rear projec- tion, this candle shines through interposed concave mirrors, or later systems of lenses, and illuminates a drawn and often colored pattern, whose mirror image is then projected outside through the hole and onto a screen - the forerunner of all film screens. So much for the principle, now for the history.
2. 2. 1 Magic Lanterns in Action
The direct precursor of the magical device was the well-known bull's eye lantern, which was made by Liesegang, a photography dealer and historian in whose honor his hometown of Dusseldorf happily renamed a street. This ancestral line appropriately casts the light of war on the lanterna magica (following Michel Foucault). Bull's eye lanterns were officially used to illuminate battlegrounds, but they were unofficially used by hunters, fishermen, poachers, and murder- ers. Even today, Greek fishing boats sail out in the Aegean at night using bull's eye lanterns to lure their prey like moths into an inescap- able light-trap. Bull's eye lanterns were absolutely forbidden during Absolutism for similar reasons: in German principalities they were forbidden because poachers (long before the invention of highways, automobile headlights, and dead game across the asphalt) ruined the route to hares and deer, which belonged to the sovereign, who had an absolute hunting monopoly; in France, the punishment for using bull's eye lanterns was the death penalty, because murderers could use them to paralyze their victims like a snake. The problem of fixing movement was therefore virulent long before photography, and the purpose of deploying bull's eye lanterns on the battleground was
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not only to make friendly movement easier but also to make enemy movement impossible.
The lanterna magica, which was presumably the descendant of snch lanterns, was unfortunately faced with an entirely different problem. It was not supposed to make movement impossible, but rather to simulate it. While the camera obscura had helped to project images, even images of moving objects, the lanterna magica did the exact oppo- site. An image of the object was moved in front of the lens system and a mirrored light source produced an enlargement, which naturally seemed considerably more alive or threatening. There were reportedly projection mechanisms that could display (believe it or not) 12 images at once; where a single soldier had done his drill at the information source, 12 soldiers (as you can easily work out) performed their well-trained threatening gestures in step at the information sinks. The strategic techniques developed for bull's eye lanterns, which deployed naked light devoid of any specific form or shape, became imaginary techniques of control through the use of images or figures. With the exception of the more modern mirror or lens system, therefore, the lanterna magica is a reversal of,the camera obscura. That may be the reason why earlier historiantattributed its invention to the same Renaissance researchers to whom the camera obscura can also be traced back. But in the meantime, it has been proven that Giambat- tista della Porta did not have access to a functioning lanterna magica. Magic lanterns did not surface nntil a century later, in 1659, when their (in retrospect) unbelievable career began. There is a scientific- technical reason for this delay - like all optical media even today, they required the development of usable lens systems - and there is also a second reason, which is worth discussing. The second reason leads to magic and conjuring, and it delivers ns, like Goethe's Faust, from the dust of the lectern.
2. 2. 2 Implementation
It appears to be no accident that the development of the lanterna magica was not attributed to artists and painters, like the camera obscura, but rather to two mathematicians: besides the Dane Thomas Walgenstein, who reportedly demonstrated the self-printing of nature from the leaves of plants, as mentioned above, it was also attrib- uted to the great Dntch mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Christian Huygens. Walgenstein presumably studied with Christian Huygens at the University of Leyden, which was famous at that time, and he reportedly said that he took a "bagatelle," which Huygens had
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not pursued any further, and made It effective and ready to go into production (Schmitz, 1981-95, p. 294). Indeed, Huygeus not only described the wave theory of light, without the knowledge of which televisions would not function, but he also made practical improve- ments to optical lens systems and built one of the first usable celestial telescopes. You can already guess the results of this arming of the eye with glasses and lenses, telescopes and microscopes in the seven- teenth century: the postulate of the visibility of all things collapsed under the evidence of the invisibly small under the microscope -like spermatozoa - and the invisibly large through the telescope -like the phases of Venus or the rings of Saturn. As we know, half of Pascal's philosophy was concerned with this, as well as the entire mathematics of differentials and integrals, which Leibniz invented while studying with Huygens of all people.
The impact of lens systems on everyday life also becomes evident when one realizes that in imperial Rome only one person had access - namely, the emperor himself, according to the near-sighted Nero - not to glasses, but rather to a piece of emerald, which was formed in such a way that it took the place of glasses at gladiator games. In short, it could be said that the baroque technology of lenses forced physical light itself, with its optical paths and refraction indexes, into the perspective that was invented only theoretically in the Renais- sance. Huygens did not deal with both reflection and refraction without reason in his Trait! ! de la lumiere, for optical media like the camera obscura and the lanterna magica implied a considerable increase in image definition: the primitive hole, which only prevented blurring in a negative way, namely by filtering, but could never become the ideal, namely an infinitely small hole, was replaced by the positive possibility of gathering and concentrating light. It was no wonder, therefore, that both these optical devices were applied on a massive scale following the development of lens systems, and they soon surfaced in such different areas as science, art, and religion, as well as in magic and folk entertainment.
2. 2. 3 Impact
2. 2. 3. 1 Propaganda
As in the case of the camera obscura, it is also only reasonahle not to attribute the mass application of the lanterna magica in the fol- lowing centuries simply to linear scientific-technical progress. It is important to note that the first reports of its deployment were not
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for sCIentIfic purposes, but rather for the purpose of creatmg illu- SIOns. For example, the scientist Huygens reportedly refused to build a bagatelle like the lanterna magica for his father, who was a famous WrIter (Schmitz, 1981-95, p. 294), and his mathematics student Walgenstein reportedly employed the iante1'11a magica not to conduct research, but rather to spread fear and horror among his spectators by projecting death as a skeleton.
It was this ghostly use of the camera obscura that made careers m the followmg penod. Its deployment was logIcally first consIdered by writers who were scientifically mterested, but who were above all religious soldiers and CatholIcs, such as the JeSUIts Athanasius Kircher and Kaspar Schott and the Premonstrant monk Johann Zahn, who reportedly built hundreds of witch lanterns (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 51). The magic in the name of the device, which could feign things to the eyes that not only happened to be absent but could also never be present, like ghosts, thus likewise needs derivation.
To bring the matter into focus, I will limit myself to Kircher, who was also one of the most exciting figures of his time. Athanasius Kircher came from around the region of Fulda in Germany, joined the Jesuit Order when he was very young (as was customary), became a professor of philosophy and mathematics (a combination that was still possible or even typical at the time), left Germany during the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War, and ended up in Rome at the Vatican. Apparently, the Holy See decided at that time to avoid any scholarly scandals in the future, like Galileo or Giordano Bruno; in any case, Kircher rose to become a kind of scientific fire brigade for the Pope: with a special mandate and special clearance he was always present when there was new scientific territory to explore as well as defend in the name of the church. Kircher's publications ranged, logi- cally enough, from mathematical combinatorics to Greek mythology to the alleged decoding of Egyptian hieroglyphics. He was a classical case of polyhistory, as it was called in the seventeenth century.
A hint concerning the magic of the lanterna magica and the purpose of its deployment can already be found in the title of the magnificent volume, in whose second edition in 1671 Athanasius Kircher pre- sented a sketch of the lanterna magica, although it was not entirely technically correct. The book is called Ars magna lucis et umbrae, the great art of light and shadow, which implies that the new optics was employed not as an instrument for scientific research but rather as an art. Among Kircher's arts, which clearly have nothing to do with Kant's aesthetics, two stand out: one military and one religious.
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It was Kircher's hope that a modified form of the lanterna magica could revolutionize signalling or communications during wartime. The use of simple torches since the time of the Greeks had always given generals the greatest difficulties in transmitting orders that went beyond mere oppositions like yes and no, light and dark. In other words, they could not send coded alphabetical messages. However, Kircher proposed a concave mirror with written symbols correspond- ing to the order to be transmitted, whose letters could be blinded. The mirror could then be held in snnlight and an articulated message could be transmitted in this way over a distance of up to 12,000 feet or three and a half kilometers, without potential enemies within this distance having a chance of intercepting or actually hindering the transmission. Kircher's signal system project was thus called crypto- logia or stenographia - secret writing with light - more than a century
before Claude Chappe's optical telegraph.
As Liesegang's history of photography already noted, entertain-
ment media like the lanterna magica were not developed for entertain- ment purposes, but rather they were byproducts or waste products of pure military research. In the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles and Teflon pans, one would say spin-offs. It is also not surprising that Kircher belonged to the only order of monks that had and still has a general at its head. As Liesegang puts it, he was looking for a telegraph communication system that was supposed to guarantee perfectly secret commnnication between the members of a militant elite, and instead he popularized an optical medium of entertain- ment, and the more uninformed and greater in numbers its observers were, the more impressive or magical it seemed. The same transition from the telegraph to simulation, from the symbolic to the imagi- nary, will retnrn with Edison's invention of the phonograph and the
kinetoscope.
The logic of replacement or spin-off raises the qnestion as to
whether and how a strategic plan remains valid in the technology of the imaginary. To answer this question, Kircher's second, reli- gious artwork mnst be presented. Namely, the Jesuit priest proposed a device that was the direct precursor of the zoetrope and must therefore be regarded as the direct precursor of film: the so-called "parastatic smicroscope" (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 56). As its name sug- gests, this device displayed or juxtaposed (those are the definitions of "parastatic") very small things, exactly like the microscope, and it consisted of a tnrntable and an optical observation facility. Small images were placed on the turntable, and enlargements could be seen through a lens system. Only Kircher's images were not simply
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dancers and models that were able to turn around and move, like the images later used with the stroboscope in 1830, but rather they were the famous stations of the Passion of Jesus Christ, which had been established for centuries. These stations were earlier painted in spatial and temporal succession in churches or along the Way of the Cross, such as St. Ottilien, but Kircher began to reel them off at time-lapse speed and they began, if you will, to move. The Mount of Olives, Calvary, etc. as the first silent film in the historv of media . . .
The obvious question here must be why the seventeenth century did not denounce Kircher's suggestion as blasphemy, why it was per- mitted for the first time to show the central concept of the Christian message as a visual work of art, that is, as an illusion of a witch lantern.
The answer, I suspect, lies in the concept of optical transmission itself. Both of Kircher's proposals have a common goal: to send optical information and thus produce military or religious effects among the receivers.
2. 2. 3. 2 Heidegger's Age of the World Picture
There is also the question of what made the lanterna magica so attrac- tive for Jesuits of all people, but before I answer this question I want to make a short diversion into the realms of philosophy. As we know, in his late work Martin Heidegger attempted to think of the basic concept of European philosophy - being - as historically changeable despite all tradition. According to one of Heidegger's theses, being first constituted itself in the form of a representation (Vorstellung) in European modernity. Representational thinking delivered being as an object for a subject, which was not at all true for the Greeks and the Romans (Heidegger, 1977, pp. 132-3). A lecture on optical media can verify the facts of the case: it can be said, following Heidegger's line of thought, that linear perspective and the camera obscura were precisely the media of this representation.
In the next step in the history of being - in the philosophy of Descartes - the representation of the subject is re-presented to the subject once again as such: cogito ergo sum - I am because I can represent anything presented before me. As Descartes makes very clear, in the cogito the difference between day and night, waking and dreaming, reality and hallucination does not count. This also allows us to grasp the history of optical media more precisely: the technical device that re-presents representation itself (instead of reality) is of course the lanterna magica. The image of something - in other words,
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its representation - is slid into the black box, and It is illnminated by a light that casts a representation of this representation, an image of this image, onto the wall. That concludes the history of being and my explanation of why the lanterna magica could not have come into existence until 100 years after the camera obscura.
2. 2. 3. 3 Jesuits and Optical Media
Bnt let us return from thinking back to theology. The camera obscura was directly linked to the letterpress. At least indirectly then, the camera obscura, linear perspective, and the Reformation went together - if for no other reason than because Luther's precept by which Protestant Christianity was founded on pure faith and pure writing could, on his own admission, not have been technically implemented without Gntenberg. You may have guessed, however, that this modern precept wonld not exactly be embraced by the one trne church. This is why the situation called for counter-measures to arm the old faith technically.
A short time before this, in 1622, Pope Gregor XV set up the con- gregatio de propaganda fidei in the Vatican: the association for the dissemination or propaganda of Catholic belief, which was the first propaganda agency in history. In the same year, the same pope can- onized the founder of the Jesuit Order. A few years later, the attempt to propagate linear perspective in Peking failed. No history of optical media should hide the fact that entertainment media are always also propaganda machines. But above all, there exists in every epoch of optical media good reason to name their strategic relationship to the enemy, that is, the written word. The only thing that occurs to Zglinicki concerning Kircher's smicroscope is the involuntarily comical sentence "we clearly see here once again the aim of the world
at that time to visualize the events with which one occupied oneself" (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 56), yet such tautologies must first be purged from a history of media war. Does the innocent "one" possibly have a darker proper name? What was the optical implementation of 6,
8, 14, or 36 Stations of the Cross about?
In at least half of Europe, the Reformation had abolished or
literally blackened medieval church rituals, with all of their visual glitter, and replaced them with the monochromatic, namely black- and-white mystery of printed letters. Sola scriptura, sola fidei - solely from writing and solely from belief. According to Luther, therefore, everyone should be able to be blessed without the worship of holy images and doing useful works for the church. Or, as King Crimson
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sings: "Starless and bible black. " The rest of Europe had to take some action against this bible black, and it invented, as you know, the so-called Counter-Reformation, which meant above all religious pro- paganda and the Jesuit Order, to which lanterna magica practitioners Athanasius Kircher and Kaspar Schott belonged as well as the per- spective propagandist Father Schall.
The Jesuit Order was the work of a single man, who was not coincidentally a soldier by profession. Inigo Lopez de Recalde, later known as Loyola, was the SCIOn of a Basque sqUlredom, and in 1521 he defended Pamplona agamst the French. He thus fought in a fortress designed by those artist-engmeers, which was systematically destroyed by the cannons designed by the self-same artist-engineers. It so happened thata cannonball badly wounded Loyola's right leg, and bis prolonged recovery from this war wound turned into a reli- gious conversion. Loyola began (probably for the first time) to read books, consumed one holy legend after the other, became increasingly religious and eventually dedicated the tools of his trade - his weapons and armour - to the miracle-working image of the Virgin Mary in the monastery of Montserrat.
Fever and delirium, books and holy images - that was more or less the medial context from which the Jesuit Order emerged. The Exercitia spiritualia of holy Ignatius, the founding text of the order's founder, was already a book opposed to all books. For Loyola, spiri- tual exercises meant exercises for the soul as well as the body, which army reformers like Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, christened as drill practice around 1600 and which early twentieth-century film theorists eventually called psychotechnics. But unlike Luther and the couutless Protestant housefathers who went to Luther's school, these exercises did not consist of transcribing and reading the Bible or throwing the inkpot at the devil, should he want to disturb their writing work. For Loyola, who had been a soldier, drill practice had nothing at all to do with writing, and he only became interested in reading when he was a critically ill patient. At some point, the eyes of the founder of the Order or the eyes of those students who, according to him, were supposed to endure his spiritual exercises surely came across the letters of a religious book and noted, for example, what was written about hell. (In all Loyola commentaries, from James Joyce to Roland Barthes to myself, hell is naturally the dramatically preferred example, but in light of Athanasius Kircher's smicroscope the passion play could just as easily be used. ) When Loyola or one
of his Jesuit pupils locked himself in a monastic cell for weeks in order to meditate on hell, therefore, the intertwiued legends were
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actually involved, but not the book called the Bible. In other words, the scant information about hell, as it stands in the only true book of the Protestants, was always already overgrown and embellished by religious fantasies. For the Jesuit Order, it was logically important to visualize long and intensively everything that had once been read until it stopped being letter or text and began instead to overwhelm the five senses themselves. Let ns read what Loyola and his pupils did in the fifth exercise. The set topic read: A Meditation on Hell. Here is the run-through:
First heading. To see in imagination those enormous fires, and the souls, as it were, with bodies of fire.
Second heading.