The magic lantern: devils, skeletons and projected wonders
From Huygens and Kircher to the travelling lanternists: the history of the magic lantern, the 17th-century device that projected images like apparitions.
Long before cinema, in the darkened rooms of courts and later in village squares, luminous figures of devils, skeletons and distant landscapes appeared on the walls. They were projected by the magic lantern, a device made of a box containing a light source, a concave mirror and a lens, in front of which painted glass slides were passed. Its very name declares its nature: an optical instrument perceived as a marvel.
Huygens, Kircher and the origins
The origins of the magic lantern are debated, but the earliest documentation points to the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, who around 1659 drew a series of figures intended for projection. Among them is a skeleton that removes its skull and puts it back in place, obtained with superimposed slides: from the very beginning, then, the new technique turned to the macabre and the marvellous.
The German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, an encyclopaedic scholar working in Rome, dealt with the play of light and shadow in his Ars magna lucis et umbrae, published in 1646. The second edition of 1671 contains an illustration of a lantern projecting figures, including a soul amid flames. Tradition long credited Kircher with the invention, but historians now believe that he rather described and popularised a device that already existed.
Lanternists and travelling shows
In the second half of the seventeenth century the lantern spread rapidly. The Dane Thomas Walgensten showed it in various European cities and at the court of Copenhagen, and in the eighteenth century it became a popular trade. Travelling lanternists, often from Savoy or northern Italy, carried the device on their backs and gave shows in houses, taverns and fairs, accompanying them with stories and music.
The subjects varied: biblical scenes, lives of saints, fables, caricatures, views of foreign cities. But a prominent place was always reserved for the devil, hell, death and spirits. The audience, largely illiterate, experienced the projection as something between entertainment and fear, and some preachers took advantage of it to make their images of the afterlife more effective.
From wonder to science
In the nineteenth century the magic lantern was improved by new light sources, such as limelight, and by slides with mechanisms that allowed movement, rotation and transformation. With the technique of dissolving views, achieved with two or three lanterns side by side, a daytime landscape could become nocturnal, or a ruined castle regain its former appearance. Scientific lectures and school lessons made wide use of it.
The shift from magic to science did not erase the original fascination. When Georges Méliès and other pioneers began projecting films, audiences had known for two centuries the experience of sitting in the dark before images of light. The magic lantern had prepared the European eye for cinema, and with it the idea that a dark room could become the place of apparitions. It is no coincidence that many early films borrowed subjects, tricks and even the decorative frames of the painted slides, as if the new art wished to declare its descent.