New Views Through the Zograscope

The concept of interactive media is familiar; we interact with our phone visually. The concept of seeing a picture in three dimensions is ordinary, mundane, and anymore part of our visual vocabulary. However, before the mid-18th century, a two-dimensional work on paper could only exhibit depth through human-applied artistic techniques such as perspective drawing, shadowing, diminishing colors, all learned techniques carried over from the Renaissance.

The way we saw the world changed in the mid-18th century. Not only did the mid-18th century fall in love with optics, the concept of sight and creation of optical marvels, but the 18th century fell in love with the wonders of geography, a new world with strange continents which many people were fated never to see. 

Thus the 18th century fell in love with a special invention, an instrument of interactive media called the zograscope. Like your phone, the zograscope was a way to experience sights you would never have been able to see – and to see them in three dimensions. The zograscope presented a vision – as if you could stick a finger into that two-dimensional picture plane – and touch the back of, say, a forest sky or the ocean’s shoreline. This invention, and the subsequent prints produced for it, created one of the earliest forms of interactive visual media, marrying science and art. The zograscope was an 18th-century predecessor to the way we now use technology to enter a visual world.

The mid-18th century collector had prints similar to those sent to me by FF: Vue de la Maison de Plaisance de Ludovisi avec une partie de la Ville de Rome; Vue du canal du Batiment chinois, de la Rotande, et des Jardins de Ranelagh nor jour de rejouissance; and Vue d’optique Greenwich Hospital London.

The wealthy voyeur collected in categorical themes, and these prints were stored in leather portfolios: The Grand Tour, the Exotic (incorrectly augmented images of the rare and unknown), Current Events (Wars), and Formal Garden. The day’s enthusiast experienced these curated visuals as a wonderment, thrilling to the new optics and their portrayal of geographical wonders, and perfection in balanced architecture. Artist and engraver André Basset capitalized, maneuvering through the gathering political storm of 18th century France, making copperplate etchings for the zograscope. The balanced architecture and symmetrical formal gardens enabled the printmakers to form the illusion of depth through receding lines; when hand-tinted, the colors lessened in hue as the view deepened.

For those who could not afford a zograscope, a traveling showman with a Peep Box on his back might charge a small fee to curious audiences, a contrast with the wealthy collector and his leather-bound portfolio, allowing the common folk a glimpse into this strange new visual world for a coin. Showmen enhanced the experience with candlelight glowing through the print with pinpricks.

Of the three prints, my favorite is the Public Pleasure Garden Ranelagh, 1760s Chelsea, a park only for the rich (not the general public), composed of beautiful structures and gardens on the Thames, 1742-1803, where the wealthy were seen in fine clothes, embroideries, wigs, and jewels. These well-off pedestrians strolled along the promenade, their saunter one continuous loop under the150’ diameter Grand Rotunda. The finely turned-out ramble included 52 spectator boxes illuminated and heated by fireplace and high window clerestories, offset by formal gardens, a fountain of mirrors, a canal, a Chinese pagoda, a Temple of Pan, all accessible from the Thames. FF’s print shows the Chinese pagoda and the Rotunda, where at the age of eight Mozart played, as did (the older!) Haydn and Handel.

Second favorite print is The Greenwich Hospital (1760s), showcasing the Baroque architecture of Sir Christopher Wren and commissioned by William and Mary for old and disabled Royal seamen (1694-1869). At its pinnacle of 3,000 pensioners during the Napoleonic War, seamen aged 12-99 petitioned for entry, but mainly entered at 56 years of age, full of spirit and the feisty sea life. The “Greenwich Geese” – as the retired and disabled sailors and marines who lived as in-pensioners were known – were anything but docile. 

Each of these prints are valued at $350 each.