The Claude Glass

"Arnaud Maillet's The Claude Glass is a contribution to the history of Western visual culture. In this first full-length study of a largely forgotten optical device from the eighteenth-century, Maillet reconfigures our historical understanding of visual experience and meaning in relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. Many are familiar with the Claude glass as a small black convex mirror used by artists and spectators of landscape to reflect a view and make tonal values and areas of light and shade visible. Maillet, in this account, goes well beyond this particular function of the glass and situates it within a richer archaeology of Western thought, exploring the uncertainties and anxieties about mirrors, reflections, and their potential distortions. He takes us from the background of the "black mirror" through a full evaluation of its importance in the age of the picturesque, to its persistence in a range of technological and representational practices such as photography, film, and contemporary art."--BOOK JACKET.