The Early Modern Camera Obscura — The Public Domain Review

For Giambattista della Porta, polymath author of Natural Magic (1558), a book of natural philosophy and alchemy filled with magic tricks and scientific experiments, the camera obscura was a space for “see[ing] all things in the dark, that are outwardly done in the Sun, with the colours of them”. This evocative phrasing suggests the metaphysical happenings that the experience of being and peering inside a camera obscura offers. Della Porta’s instructions for engineering this “very pleasant and admirable” experience — among the “great secrets of Nature” — involve managing sources of light and creating the conditions by which it can be strategically channeled: “you must shut all the Chamber windows, and it will do well to shut up all holes besides”, except for one that is as wide and long as your hand. By covering the walls with paper or white cloth to create a viewing screen, the outside world will appear indoors, both familiar and estranged: “so shall you see all that is done without in the Sun, and those that walk in the streets, like to Antipodes, and what is right will be the left, and all things changed.”