Postdoctoral Associate of the Department of History of Art and Architecture

Alhazen
Opticae Thesaurus
Basel, 1572

This printed edition of the Latinized Optics of Ibn al-Haytham, the eleventh-century scientific author in Arabic known in Europe as Alhazen and Alhacen after his first name Al-Hasan, has been prominent in my teaching and research from courses and exhibits to documentary films and multimedia projects. This text represents an important chapter in the history of optics and perspective as well as experimental methods and conceptual breakthroughs. Translated from Arabic into Latin, then Italian, with a much larger impact in Europe than in Islamic lands, it also represents an outstanding case in the transmission and transformation of early scientific works.

13 L x 9 W x 2.5 Th (in)
GC5.R4947.572i. Bought with the Fund bequeathed by Horace A. Haven of Portsmouth, N.H. (Class of 1842), 1851.

Kheirandish speaks about Alhazen’s Optics