History of Lenses

When and where were optical projections first used? When and where do paintings first show an "optical look", that suggests the use of optical techniques? Consider this sequence of four paintings, ranging from 1300 to 1430. The first three are not lifelike, they lack characteristic, detailed human features. The fourth, painted in Bruges around 1430, is an individual we would be able to recognize, almost a photographic image. Suddenly, in Bruges around 1430, something happened in Western painting. Awkwardness disappeared: realistic human beings appeared. How did this happen?? Were they using some kind of technique in the 14th century? (BBC)

David Hockney in Secret Knowledge ( A video series by BBC) contends that 400 years before the invention of the camera, artists used optics to create stunning art of that time.

As you can see above is? Jan van Eyck Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife of 1434. Hockney points out that fabrics are difficult to draw but complex objects like the chandelier in the painting are hard to draw. Anybody who knows even a little bit of drawing will understand that it is impossible to draw the chandelier as it appears in the painting with two eyes. Methods to draw such complicated objects do not exist at least for the next hundred years. Some kind of optics might have been used to draw this painting.?

A painting by? Lorenzo Lotto of husband and wife from 1523? has an elaborate tablecloth that at one point goes out of focus, Our eyes do not go out of focus. Charles Falco, who is the scientist, worked on it. This painting has so much information that he was able to calculate the focal length and diameter of the lens. Laws of geometric optics prove that Lotto used a lens and this established that artist using lens in 1540. There was a weighted argument that artists could not use lenses that early because of the quality of the glass. If not glass, then what? Mirrors were predominantly present in history. If there were convex mirrors then no reason that there would have not been concave mirrors. (BBC)

Also around? 1412, Brunelleschi invented perspective drawing, a method to draw a three-dimensional view into a two-dimensional picture. How did he conceive it??

He was an architect and his major work is the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) in Florence (1420–36), constructed with the aid of machines that Brunelleschi invented expressly for the project. There is no reason that he could have not known the use of mirrors. With a mirror lens projection, the usable image is never much more than a foot across - this is an optical characteristic of all concave mirrors, no matter how big they are. Outside this "sweet spot," it is impossible to get the image into sharp focus. Paintings made with the help of a mirror lens must therefore be very small, or must be a collage of small glimpses; details of hands, clothes, feet; fragments of landscape - and still lifes. (Grundy)

Caravaggio's Sick Bacchus (c.1593). The painting has a squashed look. Hockney associates with a collage made from a mirror lens projection.

Caravaggio's Bacchus (c.1595). Lapucci (1994) and Hockney (2001) cite the model's "left-handedness" as evidence of the use of lenses.???

Caravaggio's Matthew Called (1599-1600).Sometime around 1598 or 1599 however, Caravaggio must have begun to experiment with Della Porta's new-improved camera obscura around 1589 where he discussed the use of a? biconvex lens in the 1589 second edition of Magia Naturalis. A biconvex lens is simply a glass element that curves outward on each side which turned out to be perfect for the large, multi-figured Matthew paintings.

Also, Daniele Barbaro (1513-1570) described using a camera obscura with a biconvex lens as a drawing aid and points out that the picture is more vivid if the lens is covered as much as to leave a circumference in the middle.

The first photography lens was designed 25 years before the invention of photography. Before that time practically all lenses were intended to cover the small angular fields. With the invention of Camera Obscura lenses were required to cover a wide flat field and this problem had baffled the optician of the 18th century.?

Around 1812, an English scientist W. H. Wollaston discovered that the meniscus-shaped lens with its concave side to the front was capable of giving a much flatter field than the biconvex lens. Two recent photographs illustrated his discovery.?????

This one is taken with a simple biconvex lens of 6 inches focal length and ? inch aperture. The poor quality of the outer part is evident.

The second picture was made with a meniscus-shaped lens of the same focal length and aperture. It is evident how great an improvement has been made with a small change in the shape of the lens.

With the introduction of photography, it was found the Wollaston's simple lens suffered from excessive chromatic aberration. With such a simple lens, it was found to be impossible to focus the image sharply both on the ground glass and the sensitive plate.

?In 1829, Chevalier created an achromatic landscape lens (a two-element lens made from crown glass and flint glass) to cut down on chromatic aberration for Daguerre's experiments. Chevalier reversed the lens (originally designed as a telescope objective) to produce a much flatter image plane and modified the achromat to bring the blue end of the spectrum to a sharper focus. This lens had two apertures only, f/14 and f/15 and in order for it to work, exposure times needed to be incredibly long, on the order of hours or days. (Kingslake)

Chevalier quickly realized that if he made his landscape lenses somewhat meniscus in shape, following the Wollaston suggestion, the stop could be moved closer to lens and the angular field can be increased. This lens was known as a French Landscape lens and it was made by every manufacturer in a variety of mountings for nearly a century. The Kodak company fitted achromatic lenses to their better camera for many years and they also made some semi-achromats in which the cemented interface was plane. But they finally abandoned the achromatic landscape lenses after they found that the average user cannot detect the difference.

An important improvement in single-lens was made about 1934 when Kodak turned the simple Wollaston meniscus around and mounted the lens ahead of the stop. This greatly shortened the camera, which was its main purpose, but it also served to protect the delicate shutter mechanism from dirt, and the user was likely to be impressed with the large bull’s eye in front of the camera. The use of a front landscape lens of this kind reduces the size of distortion to pincushion instead of the barrel. More recently the lenses on low-cost cameras have been made from plastic material rather than glass, the surface can be made stronger giving a flat field, but the aberration becomes worse with the stronger surfaces. The overall advantages of a front meniscus lens are so great that this has now become the universal arrangement.

Chevalier experimented with various combinations of lenses and he could manage to raise aperture to f/6, about six times faster than the original. Unfortunately, Chevalier’s new lens was not at all good, it could in no way compete with the Petzvel Portrait lens.? (Kingslake)

The first lens designed specifically and successfully as a portrait lens was Joseph Petzval’s lens of 1840.The characteristic that made it a practical portrait lens was its speed, f/3.6, which was critical given the low sensitivity of those early processes. The speed of Petzval’s lens reduced the exposure time to a few seconds, considerably less than what the other lenses needed, making sitting times much more practical. The brightness of the Petzval lens made it a popular design choice for portrait lenses well into the twentieth century.? Even today, photographers using old processes like a wet plate or the Daguerreotype often turn to the Petzvals for their speed.?

For twenty-five years after its introduction, the Petzval lens reigned supreme for virtually all forms of photography, but especially for portraits. It began a slow decline in 1866, when Dallmeyer introduced the f/8 Rapid Rectilinear lens, but owing to the Petzval’s speed, it remained popular as a portrait lens and stayed in production by major manufacturers into the 1930’s. By the late 1880’s, the new “Jena glass” allowed Voigtlander to develop a series of Rapid Rectilinear as fast as f/6,? known as the Euryscops, but these were still slower than the Petzvals, which had been as fast as f/2.5 since the late 1860’s.Although the Euryscops were still a stop or two slower than the Petzvals, the new dry plate technology was faster than the old wet plates, so lens speed wasn’t the critical factor it once was. (A History)

?In 1867, John Dallmeyer patented a new Petzval variation, the Dallmeyer Patent Portrait Lens. Dallmeyer reversed the two rear elements and tweaked the curves slightly, which made very little difference by itself. But with the new arrangement, the spacing of the rear cells could be changed to introduce a small amount of spherical aberration. This caused the focus from a wide-open lens to spread over a zone, rather than on a flat plane. Dallmeyer’s aim was to increase the depth of field, which he did. But the spherical aberration also created what Dallmeyer termed a “soft focus”, with a sharp core image overlaid with a softer image-focused just off the focal plane.No one was at first very impressed with the “soft focus” effect, either for the softer image or the increased depth of field, but Dallmeyer’s Patent Portrait Lenses were popular because they were fast, well-made lenses that performed admirably at their sharp setting. But by twenty years later, professional photographers had noticed that a soft focus image was more flattering to the skin, especially of a female sitter, as it smoothed the skin texture, minimizing wrinkles and blemishes.? The use of soft lenses took two directions about this time; the birth of soft-focus Pictorial Photography, arguably the first academic “fine art” movement in photography, and the fashion of softened portraits in commercial photography, and both were in full swing by the dawn of the twentieth century.

By the 1880's, there were many more choices for portrait work available, including Steinheil's Portrait Antiplanet lenses which featured much better correction, as well as the Dallmeyer Rapid Rectilinear ( and Steinheil Aplanat ) design, which would come to dominate the 1900-1920 period. While Petzval Portrait lenses would continue to be sold for decades more, the slow decline of its sales had begun by 1900.? However, Dallmeyer's Patent Portrait did continue to appear in catalogues even after WWII with the option of "Dallcoating."(Sawyer)

?Between the 1830s and the 1930s, lenses steadily grew more complex, adding more elements and more ways to adjust them. The telephoto lens was invented in 1905 in Germany, known as the Busch Bis-Telar with an aperture of f/8. A telephoto lens is made physically shorter than its nominal focal length by pairing a front positive imaging cell with a rear magnifying negative cell.(Moneymaker)

By 1930, there was a rapid development of lenses. Cameras were becoming more and more common. No longer was the camera a tool used for portraiture or science but also for art. Amateurs had cameras, there were aerial cameras, movie cameras had been invented and even a few hobbyists had their own cameras to make home movies or still pictures. Reverse telephoto was appearing at first for close up projection and then for the use of techni-color three strip cameras.(Moneymaker)

By 1934, the first non-glass lenses were appearing. It started with the Perspex lens, which was a plastic lens created in 1934 by KGK Syndicate. By the end of the decade, it was assumed that glass lenses would become a relic of history while plastic, acrylic and Lucite lenses would be the way of the future.

The development that brought us lenses as we know them today was World War II, or more specifically, the aftermath of World War II. During the war,? the Japanese economy was devastated. Afterward, during the U.S. occupation of Japan, billions of dollars were poured into the nation’s economy. With close to half of the country’s factories destroyed and a large population of soldiers entering a workforce that did not have the jobs to support them, the Japanese turned themselves into a technological powerhouse. Japanese cameras and lenses became the standard that all manufacturers around the world used to forge ahead. Even today, Japan is a major force in the market for cameras and lenses. These long decades of competition are what led to the technology that we have today.

? Work Cited

“A History of Petzval Lenses”. Antique and Classic Cameras, https://www.ksmt.com/eos10d/ 120131av230/petzvallens. Accessed 08/01/2020.

BBC. “ David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge”. YouTube. Uploaded by Ancient Magic Art Tools, 13 August 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpG-ZwnNNaA. Accessed 07/29/2020.

Grundy, Susan. “Caravaggio - A Case Study by Susan Grundy”. Art Optics. https://hockney-optics.brandeis.edu/hypothesis/caravaggio/hockney.php . Accessed 08/08/2020.

Kingslake, Rudolf. A History of the Photographic Lens. Academic Press, 1989.

Moneymaker Will. “A Brief History of the Photographic Lens”. Will Moneymaker, https://moneymakerphotography.com/brief-history-photographic-lens/. Accessed 07/29/2020.

Sawyer Mark. “A History of Portrait Lens”. Western Photographic Historical Society, https://www.wphsociety.org/forums/topic/a-history-of-the-portrait-lens/. Accessed 08/01/2020.

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