This chapter examines the optical lenses and reflectors of Renaissance optical science, as used in the telescope and the microscope, and their uses as instruments of visual documentation of scientific observation, from stars to microbes. It also studies the use of mirrors and lenses in the production of illusionistic imagery, including anamorphic distensions, from a wealth of trick imagery to optical perspective cabinets to major works such as Holbein’s Ambassadors.

This short closing chapter returns to the camera obscura as earliest film apparatus and considers a related projection device, the zoetrope, as it may be imagined to have existed in antiquity. The ill-fated epic Cleopatra (1963) was to have included a charming tribute to its own medium in a scene in which Cleopatra shows Julius Caesar a zoetrope as an example of advanced technology. The chapter then turns to the Hollywood melodrama Primrose Path for the most irresistible tribute in film history to the ancient Greeks. The chapter, and the book, ends on the most stupendous view of the Acropolis ever filmed, which appeared in the Cinerama travelogue Seven Wonders of the World.

This chapter takes us to the classical precursors of the cinema and its pre-modern origin. The camera obscura was the earliest film apparatus, and Aristotle was believed to have known of it. The chapter next describes pre-cinema and traces this concept’s influence and its ramifications. While the moving bodies in prehistoric cave paintings were the first to exhibit cinematism, archaic Greek poet Simonides expressly pointed to the affinities between word and image; the Augustan Roman poet Horace later put them in canonical terms: ut pictura poesis. The chapter then surveys the pre-cinematic nature of ancient visual arts by interpreting a variety of examples (the Minoan fresco of bull jumpers, Greek vase paintings, the Roman Alexander mosaic, Trajan’s Column, many others) and introduces the rhetorical principles of enargeia (“vividness”) and epic ecphrasis. The chapter closes with an appreciation of the ingenious stage automata of Damascius and Heron of Alexandria.

Like Aristotle, the Roman epic poet Lucretius was mistakenly credited with knowledge, or even use, of the camera obscura. Few classical scholars today are aware of this strange but fascinating facet in Lucretius’ intellectual afterlife. The error arose from the misunderstanding of a passage in On the Nature of Things, in which Lucretius referred to the changes and movements of bodies in dreams. Nineteenth-century scientists compared Lucretius’ lines to stroboscopic light effects. Although Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau, inventor of the phenakistiscope, set the record straight, the misunderstanding continued into the age of cinema. The first part of this chapter traces the error through the historiography of the cinema with all its amusing misconceptions, which include an anecdote about Lucretius himself. The chapter’s second part examines the striking resemblances to Lucretius’ epic in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Beginning with Emily Dickinson’s circumscribed view of her environment, the book introduces readers to the sciences, technologies, and aesthetics of vision that inform a natural history of casualty. The nineteenth century’s declensionist narratives of species, race, and nature corresponds to narratives of a Euro-American expansion of civilization across the American continent. Dickinson’s techniques of seeing comprise what is theorized as a “sketch.” Through a feminist lens influenced by the new materialist turn in ecocriticism, the sketch is defined as an optical-textual apparatus that materially engages with the environment and that apprehends the fragile tenuousness of ecological relation. The chapter positions the sketch as a minor and partial view of nature against the dominant wide-sweeping historical romance of exploration, empire, and nation. Using Harriet Jacobs’s “loophole of retreat” as an example, the chapter lays out the ecological and epistemological stakes of critical sketches whose engagement with the discourse of declining natures nevertheless opens out to a view of their survival based upon precarious environmental relations. Reflecting the sketch’s partiality back onto literary critical methodologies, “partial reading” is proposed as a method that situates its own epistemological limits as an apprehension of the casualties produced by historicizing gestures.