Seeing the World through a Hole

From July 26th 2012 to January 27th 2013 – Museu del Cinema

A Journey around Europe through Perspective Views (1750-1860)

Here you have the Optical Box show, also known as "Mondo Nuovo", "Boîte d'Optique", "Rare-Show", "Peep Show", "Titirimundi" or "Múndia", the fairground attraction that throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries allowed the world to be seen though a hole.

The optical viewing box, a fairground show that travelled around towns and villages, showed the world to Europeans of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a sensation of reality and visual effects never before seen and using a universal language: that of images. What were known as perspective views, prints that were viewed inside the optical box, spread all over Europe, without the change of country or language affecting the message. We could say that this was the creation of the first common European market for images.

This exhibition aims to recover the memory of this long-established show and visual medium through a selection of original objects taken from the Cinema Museum's own collection.

You can see pictures of this exhibition in this link

Compare òptica views with Google Street View in this link