Abstract

There is a path stretching over two thousand years, from the awareness of shadows projected onto the back of a cave through to cinematic images. They are "real images", those that concentrate light energy and can be captured on a screen. We will examine just one fragment of this long story, which takes place in the Mediterranean and the Far East, from the birth of Western thought in Greece to the assimilation of Hellenistic culture into Arab culture. Finally, we will come to their spread through Europe in the medieval and early modern age. With Leonardo da Vinci's description of the camera obscura, the world of optics would become explicitly bound up with that of the emotions, paving the way for an unstoppable process in which images would first be fixed through photography and then freed in movement.