Venipedia

Marco Polo never reached Cipango, today’s Japan, but the discovery of America opened new trade routes. But how could religions influence the development of a very important corrective instrument in the arts, sciences and literature, such as spectacles? Did oriental faces, different in morphology from European ones, have the power to spur the design of new forms of spectacles? It is incredible how a humble object, so often little loved and mistreated, hides an almost millennial history of development. This development, however, has not been extensively investigated, especially in regards to the development of Japanese spectacles, rather than oriental spectacles in general. Wide-ranging research reveals to history lovers, spectacle collectors and simply the curious that the progress of an object – which was primarily created for eye protection around 1000 BC and reinvented in the West – could take on specific forms and peculiarities in the Japanese archipelago.

In double language, Italian and English.