The history of eyewear is an extraordinary adventure that, since its origins, combines the study of the refraction of light, the design of wearable devices and the search for comfortable and beautiful solutions to wear.
Temples and front in natural brown horn with engravings.
But the birth of real glasses is really Venetian: they were the masters of Murano glass who, starting from the 13th century, began to produce “portable” glasses, which were then very much in demand by all scholars, such as the amanuensis monks, who had difficulties to read texts written in too small characters.
These glasses developed a thesis elaborated by Pythagoras in 500 BC. and perfected by Bacon in 1260 on the use of convex glass to enlarge the vision of an object.
To get to the glasses in their classic form, however, one must wait until 1290 when the Italian monk Alessandro Della Spina has the right intuition: to avoid keeping his hands busy, he equips the two convex glasses with a curved temple to join them, so as to being able to keep them poised on the nose without using your hands. Della Spina is generally considered by all to be the inventor of modern eyewear which, however, will still have to go a long way before becoming an object of common use.
Their generalized production and mass marketing is a phenomenon that concerns the 1600s, when glasses cease to be an elite product and become an object within everyone’s reach, even in terms of cost.
Incredible for their features and very rare are the first sunglasses in history! The “gondola” glasses were produced in 1700 by the glass masters of Murano. The ultra-modern green lenses were used to protect the eyes (especially of ladies and children) during boat trips. Recent studies have shown that, despite the fact that nothing was known about the infamous UV rays at the time, Murano lenses have great filtering power.
One cannot fail to notice the similarity between these first models of eyeglasses and the basic idea of the Micromega eyewear of the titanium thread sewn to the lenses: although there is no conscious will to retrace this ancestral path, it seems that the idea of he ancient Venetian eyewear of the 15th century was somehow in the mind of Roberto Carlon, when, at the beginning of the 2000s, he designed the first Micromega frame.