Optical devices, board games and visual entertainments that came before cinema.
For four centuries, before cinema, the image learned to move. From the anamorphoses and vues d'optique of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the polyoramas, zoetropes and praxinoscopes of the nineteenth, a long line of optical devices redefined the relationship between image, light and the act of seeing: what had been still became mobile, reversible, at times participatory.
We seek out, study and describe these objects with the same rigour we reserve for rare books: each is documented, dated and, where possible, shown in motion. Alongside them stand the board games and prints that entertained and instructed whole generations.