Optical instruments including telescopes and microscopes have surprisingly long histories. Although they don’t appear in many paintings, where they do they’re usually worth examining carefully.
Simple convex lenses were being made before 400 BCE, but weren’t readily available until Arabic optical science developed around 1000 CE. By the thirteenth century, lenses were being mounted in frames to correct vision in early spectacles, and magnifying glasses were becoming widely used to see fine detail.
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Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi Rossi groups its three figures closely together. The Pope sits not on a throne, but more informally, a magnificent illuminated book (thought to be the ‘Hamilton’ Bible from about 1350) open in front of him and a magnifying glass in his left hand.
At some time between about 1590 and 1620, the first microscopes were made in the Netherlands. Telescopes probably originated there at the same time, but quickly made their way to Italy, where Galileo built his first in 1609.
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Shortly before he moved from Rome to Naples, Jusepe de Ribera painted a series of works showing the five senses. Among them, his Allegory of Sight (1615-16) was painted just a few years after the appearance of the first working telescope. Ribera’s figure is surrounded by these wondrous new inventions, as well as a traditional flat mirror. In his hands is an early telescope, possibly made in the Netherlands (which was also part of the Spanish Empire at the time) or Germany.
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Just a year or so later, in 1617, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens collaborated on their magnificent series of five allegories of the senses, including Sight. Among the cornucopia of visual and optical artefacts shown here is a sophisticated telescope, various drawing and navigational instruments relying on sight (for making sightings), a magnifying glass, a globe and an orrery (showing the orbits of the planets), and a vast collection of visual art, including both paintings and sculpture.
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With the loss of enthusiasm for allegorical paintings of the senses, the next significant work appeared over a century later, in Philip Mercier’s The Sense of Sight (1744-47). Most of the other works in this series have involved a cast of two young couples; here he uses a man, his three daughters, and son, who display three optical instruments in use: a flat mirror, a small collapsible telescope, and a magnifying glass.
The association between telescopes and mariners was well-established by the nineteenth century, when it appeared in paintings.
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Richard Dadd’s Fish Market by the Sea, from about 1860, shows an impromptu open-air fish market, run by the fishermen’s wives, to sell their husband’s catch as soon as it had been landed. This appears to contain some visual quotations, notably the figure at the back of the main group, who is wearing a fisherman’s ‘oilskin’ hat and staring intently out to sea through a mariner’s folding telescope.
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The title of John Everett Millais’ The North-West Passage from 1874 tells you how closely it coincided with the departure of a British expedition in futile quest of the rumoured north-west passage round the north of Canada to the Pacific. Enterprises like that had brought a succession of failures since the famous total loss of Sir John Franklin’s expedition of 1845.
The old man is clearly an experienced mariner, who knows the risks and futility, as expressed in his body-language. The young woman, probably his daughter, is presumably the wife of one of those on the expedition. The man stares hard and cold, the woman reads anxiously. Behind them a chart shows the limited knowledge of the area of the north-west passage at the time. Flags declare an affinity with the nation, and its Navy. A painting on the wall shows a ship negotiating ice in the far north. The view through the window shows that this is set on the coast, and there is a sailing vessel in sight. A telescope rests on the table, by a glass presumably containing rum. Below the table are old ships’ logs and other papers.
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For the fisherfolk of Cullercoats, when Winslow Homer lived among them, watching the sea was recognised as being such an important task that the Coastguard started to pay lookouts and provide them with telescopes, as shown in his Lookout from 1882. That work was often undertaken by older men who could no longer go to sea.
Microscopes enjoyed a brief popularity in paintings around the start of the twentieth century, initially in Naturalist works depicting scientists of the day.
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Joaquín Sorolla’s Portrait of Dr. Simarro at the Microscope from 1897 shows Doctor Luis Simarro Lacabra (1851-1921), an eminent psychiatrist in Madrid who also undertook pioneering research looking at the fine structure of the brain. Among his many achievements was a modification of an established technique for staining microscopic sections of brain, which proved a major advance and an inspiration to the great Spanish neurohistologist Ramon y Cajal.
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Santiago Ramón y Cajal is shown at work in this portrait by Ricardo de Madrazo. He is looking into the microscope with which he must have spent so many long days studying slides of brains, drawing every finest detail, hour after hour.
For a while, microscopes became a badge of office for medical practitioners, as shown by John Collier in this open narrative or ‘problem picture’ from 1908.
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Collier’s The Sentence of Death quickly became very popular. A young middle-aged, and presumably family, man stares blankly at the viewer, having just been told by his doctor – visual clues given include a brass microscope and sphygmomanometer – that he is dying. The doctor appears disengaged, and is reading from a book, looking only generally in the direction of his doomed patient.