By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The Middle Ages saw a technological revolution that changed the way humans live, for ever. The invention of eyeglasses served to magnify the vision of an individual and extend the natural capacities of the human eye.
Invention of Eyeglasses
By the 10th century, Arabic translations of the 2nd century Greek treatise on optics by Claudius Ptolomaeus were in circulation, and Ptolemy’s work was simultaneously improved upon by his Muslim adaptors.
By the early 13th century, Latin versions of these works were reaching scholars as far away as England, where Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon both speculated about the uses of magnifying lenses.
But it was apparently in the commercial city-states of northern Italy that eyeglasses are first known to have been crafted, in the late 1280s, probably in Pisa. The date and place are inferred from a Latin sermon given in Florence by a famous Dominican preacher, Giordano da Pisa, in February of 1306, whose words were later reported in Italian. Giordano had recalled:
It is not yet twenty years since the discovery of the art of making eyeglasses, which make for good vision, one of the best arts and most necessary that the world has. I saw the one who first discovered and practiced it, and I talked to him.
His pair could even have been made by a fellow Dominican at the church of Saint Caterina in Pisa, Alessandro da Spina, who had—according to a local chronicle—pirated the invention of another craftsman who had refused to share his intellectual property.
The Order of Friars Preacher
The Dominicans, more formally known as the Order of Friars Preacher, or Preaching Friars, had been founded in the early 13th century to be scholarly “shock troops” in the “war on heresy”. They took their popular name from their founder, Saint Dominic de Guzmán, who had been born and raised in Castile, a Christian kingdom on the front lines of an escalating crusade against the Muslim states of al-Andalus.
In Latin, the name Domini Canes can be translated to “hounds of the Lord”, and the order’s members certainly acted as the attack dogs of the papacy, indicting and interrogating heretics; or, in the case of Saint Thomas Aquinas, using formidable learning to advance the first systematic theology of the Roman Church and the most comprehensive handbook of arguments to be leveled against the pagan enemies of Christendom.
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Dominicans: The First to Don Eyeglasses
It’s no surprise, then, that of the hundreds of pairs of eyeglasses represented in medieval manuscript illuminations and paintings, the earliest appear in the portraits of prominent, hard-working Dominican intellectuals.
A series of frescoes in the Convent of Saint-Nicolas in Treviso depicts an early theologian of the order, Hugh of Saint-Cher, wearing a pince-nez and an expression of fierce absorption while writing at his desk. The Dominican cardinal Nicolas of Rouen, to whom the church was dedicated, peers at a book through a magnifying glass.
Spectacles Quickly Gained Popularity
By the middle of the 14th century, spectacles were quickly finding their way to users beyond the clergy. In Florence, where Giordano had preached their virtues in 1306, the local poet laureate, Francesco Petrarca, had taken to wearing them when he turned sixty, to stem the failure of his once acute eyesight.
As the market for eyeglasses expanded, so did the need for suppliers—only checked, it seems, by the desire of Pisan craftsmen to establish a monopoly. As late as 1445, a Pisan notary drew up a kind of nondisclosure agreement in a contractual document made for three goldsmiths, one of whom agreed to teach the other two how to make eyeglasses and thereby committed not to teach anyone else the art for four and a half years.
Representation in Paintings and Manuscripts
The first shop devoted to eyeglasses and accessories, such as handy carrying cases for the belt, opened in Strasbourg in 1466. Meanwhile, artworks show that a host of holy figures from the Bible or the Early Church were retrofitted with spectacles to improve their sight and signal their studiousness.
An anonymous apostle, by the German master Conrad von Soest, dons a pair in 1403; another apostle, in a contemporary painting from Austria, studies a book while Saint Peter, in papal tiara, administers the Last Rights to the Blessed Virgin; and Luke the evangelist writes his gospel with their aid in another contemporary painting.
Significance of the Invention
The extra focus and precision enabled by eyeglasses would have been helpful to those who first charted the coasts and currents of medieval waterways, or who needed to follow the routes they laid down.
This invention was a part of the technological revolution that enabled the conquest of spatial and temporal distance, and was created within a crucible of cultural, economic, and military developments. The invention would be a crucial tool in the arsenal that contributed to the exploratory and imperial successes of late medieval and early modern European states.
Common Questions about the Invention of Eyeglasses in the Middle Ages
It was apparently in the commercial city-states of northern Italy that eyeglasses are first known to have been crafted, in the late 1280s, probably in Pisa. The date and place are inferred from a Latin sermon given in Florence by a famous Dominican preacher, Giordano da Pisa, in February of 1306.
Of the hundreds of pairs of eyeglasses represented in medieval manuscript illuminations and paintings, the earliest appear in the portraits of prominent, hard-working Dominican intellectuals.
In Latin, the name Domini Canes can be translated “hounds of the Lord”, and the order’s members certainly acted as the attack dogs of the papacy, indicting and interrogating heretics; or, in the case of Saint Thomas Aquinas, using formidable learning to advance the first systematic theology of the Roman Church and the most comprehensive handbook of arguments to be leveled against the pagan enemies of Christendom.
