PRE-PHOTOGRAPHIE Opérations géodésiques et astronomiques pour la mesure d’un arc du parallèle moyen exécutées en Piémont et Savoie par une commission composée d’officiers de l’Etat-Major général et d’astronomes Piémontais et Autrichiens en 1821, 1822, 1823.

Newhall.

First edition, very rare.

This is one of the first books to be published with the help of the Camera lucida, an optical device patented by William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) in 1807. The camera lucida performs an optical superimposition of the subject being viewed upon the surface upon which the artist is drawing. The artist sees both scene and drawing surface simultaneously, as in a photographic double exposure. This allows the artist to duplicate key points of the scene on the drawing surface, thus aiding in the accurate rendering of perspective.

The basic optics were described 200 years earlier by Johannes Kepler in his Dioptrice (1611), but there is no evidence he or his contemporaries constructed a working camera lucida. By the 19th century, Kepler’s description had fallen into oblivion, so Wollaston’s claim was never challenged. While on honeymoon in Italy in 1833, the photographic pioneer William Fox Talbot used a camera lucida as a sketching aid. A note in volume I, p. 25 indicates that the images illustrating this edition were drawn with the help of Wollaston’s device: “Les panoramas ou vues perspectives de l’horizon du Mont-Colombier, du Pic du Frêne, de la Roche-Chévrière, du Mont-Tabor, de la Roche-Melon et de Superga, ajoutées à cet ouvrage, ont été prises sur les lieux avec la chambre claire de Wollaston”.

“Still another mechanical substitute for artistic skill was the camera lucida, invented by the Englishman W.H. Wollaston in 1806. Drawing paper was laid flat. Over it a glass prism was suspended at eye level by a brass rod. Looking through the prism the operator saw at the same time both the subject and the drawing paper ; his pencil was guided by the virtual image (…) The physical aid of camera obscura and camera lucida had drawn men so near to an exact copying of nature and the satisfaction of the current craving for reality that they could not abide the intrusion of the pencil of man to close the gap. Only the pencil of nature would do. The same idea burned in many at once, and the race for discovering was on : to make light itself fix the image in the camera without having to draw it by hand” (Newhall. Hist. of Photography).

The scientific commission in charge of the project was composed on the Austrian side by Campana, Brupacher and Carlini, while the Italian research was undertaken by Isasca, Pirrino, Casalegno and Plana. The 18 text engravings show the topographical details of the mountains.

Fine copy in a rich binding, probably executed in Milan.

Provenance: ‘LV’ (book plate in volume I).