The outer eye. Vision and artificein the early seventeenth century

Abstract

Early in the seventeenth-century Kepler studied the human eye as an optical instrument. Some decades later, Descartes proposed an experiment to approach the eye as an object, totally separated from the body. The exterior eye, assumed as an analogy of the camera obscura, would help to understand vision, to explain refraction, and to model better optical devices. That same exterior eye would broaden as well the aesthetic observation and exploration of light. The objectified eye, detached from the body, became a subject matter for an observer still totally embodied. In this strangeness, the technical eye and the organic eye look at each other and model one another.