Spectacles

The story

When letters go blurry

Anyone over forty knows it: at a certain point reading becomes tiring. The letters in books go blurry and you have to hold the page further away to see them. The condition is called presbyopia: with age the lens, the eye's natural lens, loses its elasticity and finds it harder to focus on things that are close. Today it is solved with a pair of glasses, but for thousands of years there was no remedy.

For a monk, a copyist, a notary or a merchant who needed to read and write for a living, presbyopia often meant the end of a career at about forty. The work of the monasteries and of the writing workshops depended on healthy eyes.

Lenses already known

Lenses had been known for a long time. People knew that a piece of rock crystal or glass, cut into the shape of a drop, makes things look bigger. Arab scholars, such as Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), had written treatises on optics. In Europe, in the 1200s, the English friar Roger Bacon spoke of lenses that help people with weak sight. In monasteries, crystal stones were used, called “reading stones”, to be laid on the pages to magnify the letters.

One decisive step was missing: putting two lenses in a frame to wear in front of the eyes, and freeing the hands.

Friar Giordano's testimony

On 23 February 1306, in Florence, in a church, a Dominican friar from Pisa, Giordano da Pisa, gave a sermon. At one point he said that not even twenty years had passed since the art of making spectacles had been found, “one of the best and most necessary arts that the world has”, and that he had personally known the man who first made them. His words are one of the oldest documents that mention spectacles: they tell us that they were invented around 1286-1290, probably in Tuscany.

We do not know who the inventor was, and perhaps we never shall. A chronicle of the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina, in Pisa, tells that another friar, Alessandro della Spina, who died in 1313, happened to see a pair of spectacles made by a person who did not want to reveal the secret; Alessandro copied them and taught everyone how to make them, “with a cheerful and willing heart”. That is why, in the 1300s, spectacles spread quickly.

Spectacles were liked at once, but not by everyone: people who wore them were sometimes teased, and for a while they were thought of as an object for elderly and learned people. In the 1400s, with printed books, they became normal; scholars wore them habitually, and in many paintings scholarly saints, such as Saint Jerome, have spectacles on the table.

What the first spectacles were like

The first spectacles did not have the arms that rest on the ears. They were two convex lenses, that is, curved outward, in frames of bone, wood, horn or metal, joined by a rivet above the nose. They were held in the hand in front of the eyes or rested on the nose, and served only for reading close up. The lenses, of rock crystal or glass, were very expensive and made by hand.

The oldest picture of spectacles is a fresco of 1352 by Tommaso da Modena, at Treviso, in which Cardinal Hugh of Saint-Cher, busy writing in his study, has a pair of spectacles on his nose. Soon afterwards they multiplied in paintings. In Venice, at Murano and elsewhere, workshops of spectacle-makers (“occhialai”) arose, with rules for the quality of their products.

Spectacles for the short-sighted, with concave lenses, appeared later, in the 1400s. A famous example is Raphael's portrait of Pope Leo X, of about 1518, in which the pope holds in his hand a lens for the short-sighted. The arms that rest on the ears were introduced only in the 1700s.