The Science of Light and Color Seeing and Knowing


THE SCIENCE OF LIGHT AND COLOR,

SEEING AND KNOWING
David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
Sophisticated theories of light, color, and vision were produced in the ancient
Greek world – committed to writing and transmitted in treatises by Aristotle,
Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen, and others. Although most of these works were
unavailable to Latin-reading scholars in early-medieval Europe, fragments
of Greek optical theory did circulate in a variety of encyclopedic works and
philosophical or theological treatises. It was not until the thirteenth century,
inspired by the wholesale translation of Greek and Arabic scientific literature,
that the scholarly discipline called perspectiva emerged in Europe as the object
of university lectures and a recognizable piece of the intellectual equipment
of the educated university graduate.
Perspectiva came to be represented in the thirteenth century by influential
standard texts that treated the physics and mathematics of light, color, and
vision. Also included were discussions of the anatomy and physiology of
the eye and visual apparatus, inquiries into the psychological faculties and
cognitive processes that made vision possible, and analyses of phenomena
associated with light as an astrological or cosmological agent. Roger Bacon,
writing in the seventh decade of the century, could plausibly declare that
without a knowledge of perspectiva one could “know nothing of value in
philosophy.” How perspectiva achieved this exalted status in medieval Europe,
and how it managed to embrace theories ranging from cognitive processes
to the radiation of cosmic power, are the subjects of this chapter.
 The quotation is from Roger Bacon, Opus minus, in Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, ed. J. S.
Brewer (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, ), p. . In what follows, we draw
upon and extend research that we have published elsewhere, especially David C. Lindberg, Theories
of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); and Katherine H.
Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology, and the Foundations of
Semantics, 1250–1345 (Leiden: Brill, ). Portions of this chapter bear a close resemblance to David
C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau, “Perspectiva: la scienza della luce, del colore e della visione,”
in Storia della scienza, vol. : Medioevo, Rinascimento, ed. Sandro Petruccioli (Rome: Istituto della
Enciclopedia Italiana, ), pp. –, which we were writing at about the same time and (owing
to the publisher’s oversight) appeared without Lindberg’s name.

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 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
The physical transmission of ancient Greek optical knowledge is well
understood. The Greek sources were transplanted first to the Islamic world
and later to medieval France and England, where the first shoots of perspec-
tival knowledge appeared in the early-thirteenth-century œuvre of Robert
Grosseteste. Flowering at mid-century in the Parisian works of Grosseteste’s
admirer Roger Bacon, it was disseminated from Paris and the papal court at
Viterbo (to which Bacon had dispatched his major writings) through trea-
tises on perspectiva written by several younger scholars who were inspired by
Bacon and influenced by the same sources that had shaped his perspectival
theories.
If we are to understand the range of meaning of perspectivist science
for medieval intellectuals, we must explore three of its aspects: first, its
account (both mathematical and physical) of light and vision; second, its
exploration of cognitive processes, including theories of the interior senses
and the anatomical structure of the brain; and third, the metaphysical,
cosmological, and astrological speculation concerning light in which all of
this was embedded.
GREEK BEGINNINGS
It seemed clear to Aristotle (– b.c.) that perception, no matter which

sense we have in mind, requires contact. This contact is obvious in taste
and touch, but sight seems to be a long-range phenomenon that violates
that requirement. Thus one of the central problems confronting Greek
philosophers attempting to understand how we perceive the world visually
was to explain how invisible contact occurs between a visible object and
the organs of sight. Ancient authors produced a variety of answers, all of
them requiring either that the eye emit something in the direction of the
visible object (extramission) or receive something from the visible object
(intromission); an intervening medium might or might not play a role in
conveying this something (visual images or visual power) between object
and eye.
The intromission alternative was most influentially formulated by Aristo-
tle, who undertook a detailed analysis of the nature of light, its relationship
to the transparent medium through which it was propagated, and the causal
mechanism by which it provoked visual sensation. He concluded that light
does not consist of independent entities (“substances” such as atoms). Rather,
he argued, light is a state of the transparent medium that is achieved when the
presence of a self-luminous body, such as the Sun, moves the transparency of
that medium from potentiality to a state of actuality. Having thus become
actually transparent, that medium may be further endowed with the quality
of color, owing to the presence of a colored body. The medium transmits
this color instantaneously to the eye of an observer, where coloring of the
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 
interior humors produces the appropriate sensation. Some version or varia-
tion of this intromission theory survived within Aristotelian traditions until
the seventeenth century.
One of Aristotle’s purposes was to refute earlier philosophers’ mistrust
of sense perception. His refutation rested on the understanding that the
“coloring of the interior humors” makes the eye temporarily similar to the
colored body, thereby, through its assimilation, providing the sense organ
with direct experience of what the world is really like. Moreover, in human
beings and other animals, according to Aristotle, “sensations and images
remain in the sense-organs even when the sensible objects are withdrawn,”
which enables the process of assimilation to continue into the heart and
brain. When we observe an object in the outside world, he argued, the visual
images impressed upon the eye by the illuminated medium, along with
impressions from other exterior senses (such as odors received in the nose)
and sensible features of the object (such as its motion or rest) common to
more than one exterior sense, are brought together in a “common sensation.”
Aristotle’s readers understood him to have been speaking of an interior
faculty or capacity, the “common sense,” and also to have described other
internal senses. These were “phantasy,” so called from the “appearances”
(phantasmata, or phantasms) or residual perceptual impressions of sensed
objects that it manipulates, and “memory,” a treasury where these images of
what the senses have perceived may be stored for later use. Not least among
such uses is the higher work of the rational (or intellectual) soul.
Aristotle barely touched on the mathematics of light and vision, preferring
to deal with natures and causes. However, a tradition of analyzing these
phenomena mathematically soon sprang from the work of Euclid (fl. 
b.c.) and his successors. Euclid devoted his attention almost entirely to the
geometry of radiating light, which he presented in his Optica and Catoptrica.
In these works, he established the equal-angles law of reflection, presented
 Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, pp. –. On all of the ancient theories of vision,
also see the excellent account by A. Mark Smith, trans., Alhacen’s Theory of Visual Perception: A
Critical Edition, with English Translation and Commentary of the First Three Books of Alhacen’s “De
Aspectibus,”  vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, ), vol. , pp. xxvi–xliv.
 Aristotle, De anima, III. For the quoted line, see III..b. See also Harry A. Wolfson, “The Internal
Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophical Texts,” Harvard Theological Review,  (),
–.
 On this mathematical tradition, see Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, chap. ;
Albert Lejeune, Euclide et Ptolémée: deux stades de l’optique géométrique grecque (Louvain: Université
de Louvain, ); Albert Lejeune, Recherches sur la catoptrique grecque (Brussels: Académie Royale
de Belgique, Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, Mémoires, ), vol. , fasc.
; A. Mark Smith, “Ptolemy’s Theory of Visual Perception: An English Translation of the Optics,
with Introduction and Commentary,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, , pt. 
(); Sylvia Berryman, “Euclid and the Sceptic: A Paper on Vision, Doubt, Geometry, Light
and Drunkenness,” Phronesis,  (), –; A. Mark Smith, “Ptolemy, Alhacen, and Kepler
and the Problem of Optical Images,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy,  (), –, especially pp.
–; and A. Mark Smith, “Ptolemy’s Search for a Law of Refraction: A Case-Study in the Classical
Methodology of ‘Saving the Appearances’ and Its Limitations,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences,
 (), –.
 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
Figure .. Vision by reflected rays according to Euclid and Ptolemy. E is the
observer’s eye and O the visible object. An observer at E judges the image, I, to be
located where the linear extension of the visual ray EB intersects the perpendicular
OCI, drawn vertically from the object to the reflecting surface.
rules for locating the image of an object observed in a mirror (Figure .),
and offered a qualitative understanding of the phenomena of refraction – all
applicable to both the light emanating from external sources, such as the Sun,
and the light emanating from the eye. Integral to this mathematical analysis
was Euclid’s extramissionist theory of vision, which declared that radiation
reaches outward from the observer’s eye in the form of visual rays (rectilinear
rays bundled as a cone, with its apex in the observer’s eye) and perceives visible
objects simply by virtue of encountering them. The visual cone became the
foundation of a theory of mathematical perspective according to which (for
example) objects that intercept rays high in the visual cone appear high and
those intercepting rays low in the visual cone appear low, and the perceived
size of a visible object is proportional to the angle formed in the eye by the
visual rays that touch its periphery (Figure .).
Borrowing Euclid’s extramissionist approach and his geometrical analysis,
Ptolemy (fl. –) was able to set them in a theory of considerably greater
mathematical sophistication that, moreover, broadened to embrace notions
of the physical nature of the visual radiation and the process of perception.
Included in his Optica was an impressive analysis of reflection in spherical
mirrors, both concave and convex, and an investigation, both experimental
and quantitative, of the refraction of light as it passes from one transparent
medium to another. More than any earlier scholar, Ptolemy brought together
in his work the shared geometrical foundations of optics and astronomy.
Most notably, he provided a mathematical understanding of the problems
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 
Figure .. Euclid’s visual cone. Objects intercepting rays high within the cone
of visual rays will appear high within the visual field of the observer. Objects
intercepting rays low within the visual cone will appear low within the observer’s
visual field.
that the reflection and refraction of light posed for the observation of celestial
phenomena and thereby a means of correcting for the resulting perceptual
distortions.
A third tradition of ancient optical thought, concerned with the anatomy
and physiology of the eye and optic nerves, was codified by the physician
Galen (d. after ), a great but eclectic scholar who studied and contributed
to Platonic, Stoic, and Aristotelian philosophy. Galen provided a detailed
(and largely accurate) description of the tunics and humors of the eye,
including the aqueous and vitreous humors, the crystalline humor (or lens),
cornea, iris, retina, and optic nerves. His theory of vision, heavily influenced
by Stoic thought, maintained that the crystalline lens is the principal organ
of vision, endowed with visual power by pneuma conveyed from the brain
by the optic nerves. This pneuma emerges from the eye and transforms the
surrounding transparent medium into an extension of the optic nerve and an
instrument of vision, capable of perceiving the objects it touches. Perceptions,
in turn, as “impressions” conveyed to the brain, provide the requisite basis of
other psychological processes, which are carried out in distinct regions of the
brain. Galen himself evidently thought that the psychic pneuma carries out
these processes – the completion of perception and, with it, consciousness,
the storage of sensed images, memory – in the substance of the brain itself.
Those who built on Galen’s work attributed to him the view that these
 On Galen’s philosophical formation and contributions, see John Whittaker, “Plotinus at Alexandria:
Scholastic Experiences in the Second and Third Centuries,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica
medievale,  (), –, especially pp. –. On Galen’s theory of vision, see Lindberg, Theories
of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, pp. –; Glenn Lesses, “Content, Cause, and Stoic Impressions,”
Phronesis,  (), –; and Fernando Salmón, “The Many Galens of the Medieval Commentators
on Vision,” Revue d’histoire des sciences,  (), –.
 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
operations took place in four regions of the brain known as its “cavities” or
“ventricles.”
By the time of Galen’s death, most schools of thought considered the
workings of light crucial to an understanding of metaphysical and cosmo-
logical reality and therefore accorded vision primacy in accounts of the
processes by which a person encounters, records, recalls, interacts with, and
comes to understand the cosmos. Nowhere was this more completely the
case than within the Platonic tradition, particularly among Neoplatonists,
who were committed to harmonizing Aristotle’s thought with Plato’s while
also absorbing views from other philosophical schools. Plotinus (d. ),
generally regarded as the founder of Neoplatonic philosophy, explained the
relationship between the singularity of the One, the ground of all being,
and the multiplicity of created things in terms of radiating light, arguing
that just as rays of light emanate from the Sun, so a lesser form of being
emanates from the One through an overflowing of its essence (a theory
referred to by historians as “emanationism”). Plotinus also declared light to
be the form that endows matter with corporeality or dimensionality. And,
in a doctrine that would have important repercussions in the later Middle
Ages, he maintained that everything that exists radiates images or likenesses
of itself into surrounding bodies. Also significant for later thinkers was Plot-
inus’s acceptance of Galen’s anatomical and physiological evidence that the
starting point of sense perception (including visual perception), of the sub-
sequent sensory evaluation or “judgment” of what the eyes have seen, and of
such other functions as imagination lay in the brain and required its use of
the body’s nerves.
One of the few pieces of the Greek optical achievement available to
late-Roman and early-medieval authors was this Neoplatonic metaphysics
and epistemology of light. Scholars in Latin Christendom knew the theo-
ries of Plotinus indirectly through the writings of Augustine of Hippo, the
pseudo-Dionysius, and other fathers of the Christian church. No patristic
author was more influential in Western Christendom than Augustine, for
whom vision required activity on the part of the observer, exercised through
the extramission of visual rays (borrowed from Plotinus and Stoic sources)
and the choice of objects within the visual field on which to focus atten-
tion. Augustine admitted that the viewer was not only an agent but also a
 J. Leyacker, “Zur Entstehung der Lehre von den Hirnventrikeln als Sitz psychischer Vermögen,”
Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin,  (), –; and Walter Pagel, “Medieval and Renaissance
Contributions to Knowledge of the Brain and Its Function,” in The History and Philosophy of
Knowledge of the Brain and Its Functions, ed. F. N. L. Poynter (Oxford: Blackwell, ), pp. –.
 On light in the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions, see David C. Lindberg, “The Genesis of Kepler’s
Theory of Light: Light Metaphysics from Plotinus to Kepler,” Osiris, ser. ,  (), – at pp.
–; and David C. Lindberg, Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Edition, with English
Translation, Introduction, and Notes, of De multiplicatione specierum and De speculis comburentibus
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. xxxv–xlviii. See also Teun Tieleman, “Plotinus on the Seat of
the Soul: Reverberations of Galen and Alexander in Enn. IV,  [], ,” Phronesis,  (), –.
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 
recipient of the exterior light that made vision possible and of an image (or
“species”) of the seen object in the viewer’s eye, transmitted from there to
the memory for storage. For Augustine, as for Plato, the corporeal vision of
physical objects “by the [extramitted] visual rays that shine through the eyes
and touch whatever we see” served as a model for understanding how the
“mind’s gaze” (acies mentis) actively reaches toward and achieves intellectual
knowledge or spiritual understanding of intelligible objects such as God.
Augustine’s frequent references to the spiritual implications of both sensory
and intellectual sight would offer encouragement to thirteenth-century read-
ers interested in the mathematical and empirical investigation of light and
vision.
THE ISLAMIC CONTRIBUTION
Although scholars in early-medieval Christian Europe had only fragmentary

access to the Greek traditions just sketched, the major Greek works were
translated into Arabic after the advent of Islam and stimulated scholarly
activity within the Islamic world in each of the areas of Greek achievement.
Galen’s works, for example, were translated by scholars such as the Nestorian
Christian H . unayn ibn Ish.āq (d. ), a physician whose interpretation of
Galen’s views on the anatomical location of the various faculties of the interior
senses had a powerful influence in both Islam and (later) European Chris-
tendom, and whose own treatment of the anatomy and physiology of the
eye and visual pathway made Hellenistic ophthalmology widely available.
Scholars in the Islamic world also had better access to the teachings
of Plotinus and his systematizer, Proclus. Their emanationism was widely
diffused among scholars who recovered and furthered Aristotle’s thought,
from Alkindi to Ibn Sı̄nā (known as Avicenna to those who would read
his works in Latin). Indeed, somebody in the Islamic world created the
distillation of Plotinus and Proclus that later circulated in the Latin West
under the name of Aristotle as the Liber de causis.
 Margaret Miles, “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De
Trinitate and Confessions,” The Journal of Religion,  (), –.
 See Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, pp. –. On Hunayn’s contributions
to visual theory, see also Bruce S. Eastwood, “The Elements of Vision: The Micro-cosmology of
Galenic Visual Theory According to H . unayn Ibn Ish.āq,” Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society, , pt.  (). Hunayn’s views became known to Western readers under the name of
Constantine the African, the eleventh-century translator of Hunayn’s De oculis and Introduction
(Isagoge) to Galen’s Tegni. On the De causis, which bound Aristotelian to Neoplatonic (meta)physics,
see Cristina d’Ancona Costa, Recherches sur le livre De causis (Paris: Vrin, ). On the translations,
see Newman, Chapter , this volume.
 Christina d’Ancona Costa, Recherches sur le livre De causis. See also Gerhard Endress, “L’Aristote
arabe: Réception, autorité et transformation du premier maı̂tre,” Medioevo: Rivista di storia della
filosofia medievale,  (), –; and Pinella Travaglia, Magic, Causality and Intentionality: The
Doctrine of Rays in al-Kindı̄ (Florence: Sismel/Edizioni del Galluzzo, ).
 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
Scholars also undertook synthetic efforts. The philosopher Alkindi (or
al-Kindı̄, d. ) was the first Arabic writer to master the entirety of Greek
treatments of light and vision as well as the science of the stars. And he
emphasized that students of the stars and students of sight investigated the
same fundamental phenomenon: the radiation of power itself, including
light. After Alkindi, many other savants in the Islamic world augmented
a growing body of literature on light and vision. The physician and poly-
math Avicenna (–) was especially prolific, and the wide diffusion and
influence of his writings into early-modern times would be difficult to over-
state. Two works in which Avicenna detailed these subjects were particularly
widely known in Latin translation. The first, a section from his Book of Heal-
ing (Kitāb al-Shifā ), circulated as a commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul
(De anima); it included lengthy treatises on vision and on the interior senses,
in which Avicenna extensively refuted extramissionist accounts. The second,
his Canon of Medicine (Liber canonis or Kitāb al-Qānūn), long a standard
textbook for physicians in the West, brought together his thinking on these
topics and ophthalmology. Ibn Rushd (–), known in the Latin West
as Averroes, also contributed significant treatments of light, vision, and the
internal senses.
The geometrical tradition of Euclid and Ptolemy was taken up by a
number of skillful Islamic mathematicians, including Alkindi, Ahmad ibn
Īsā (ninth century), Qustā ibn Lūqā (d. ), and Ibn al-Haytham. Of all
authors writing about light and vision in Arabic, Ibn al-Haytham, known
in the West as Alhacen (–/), was by far the most significant,
for his great optical treatise Kitāb al-Manāzir (Book of Optics) marks a solid
synthesis of several of the distinct traditions of optical thought. Moreover,
it was extraordinarily influential, profoundly shaping  years of Western
optical thought after its translation into Latin (as De aspectibus) around the
beginning of the thirteenth century.
As Alhacen recognized, the major ancient optical traditions were at odds
not merely about theoretical matters such as the nature of light and the
directionality of the vision-causing rays but also the very criteria that a theory
needed to satisfy in order to be judged successful: mathematical criteria for
the Euclideans; physical or causal criteria for Aristotle, Aristotelians, and
 Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, pp. –; Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the
Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works (Leiden: Brill, );
and Simone van Riet, ed., Avicenna Latinus: Liber de Anima,  vols. (Leiden: Brill, –).
 On the spelling of Alhacen’s name (which in medieval Europe was always spelled with a “c” rather
than the “z” invented by Friedrich Risner in his  printing of Alhacen’s Optica), see David C.
Lindberg, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, ), p. xxxiii n. . On Alhacen’s achievement, see The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham, Books I–III
on Direct Vision, ed. and trans. A. I. Sabra,  vols. (London: The Warburg Institute, ); Smith,
Alhacen’s Theory of Visual Perception; and Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler,
chap. .
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 
Neoplatonists; and anatomical and physiological criteria for Galen and the
physicians. Refusing to cast his lot with any one set of criteria and the visual
theory it spawned, Alhacen set out to merge the three approaches by devising
a single comprehensive theory of vision capable of satisfying all three sets of
criteria simultaneously. Those who followed Alhacen’s lead could no longer
be satisfied with a geometrical account of vision that overlooked the nature of
light and the anatomy of the visual apparatus, or one that examined physical
or physiological issues while ignoring the mathematics of light and vision.
Their optical theories had to be comprehensive in scope in order to meet
comprehensive measures of success.
However, delivering on this promise proved a formidable challenge. The
challenge was not experimental, although at every point Alhacen took empir-
ical data seriously as measures of theoretical adequacy. The problems were
theoretical, and theoretical effort was required to solve them. By some means
unknown to us (but most probably by reading the texts of predecessors, both
Greek and Islamic), Alhacen had gained a full mastery of all of the major
ancient optical traditions; he knew his Aristotle, his Euclid, his Ptolemy,
his Galen, and his Alkindi. His project required him to submit the theo-
retical claims on which these traditions were founded to careful scrutiny
and meticulous criticism. He was obliged to identify errors, adjudicate rival
claims, craft compromises, and (above all) construct arguments. The goal
was to demonstrate the mutual compatibility of the core achievements of
the Aristotelian Neoplatonists, the Euclideans, and the Galenists.
A brief look at Alhacen’s intromission theory of vision will serve to illus-
trate this point. In order to establish that vision occurs by the reception in
the eye of rays issuing from the visual object, Alhacen appealed to relevant
empirical data, such as afterimages and the ability of bright light to injure
the eye, which in his view demonstrate that in the act of vision the eye is
the recipient of action from outside. He argued further (following Alkindi)
that the forms of light and color issue in all directions from every point of
visible objects and that it is the nature of transparent bodies to receive and
transmit these forms (Figure .). Alhacen (like Avicenna) therefore insisted
that visual radiation emanating from the eye would be redundant and should
not be supposed to exist.
But if vision were to occur by intromission of rays from the visible object,
how could one salvage the mathematical analysis of Euclid and Ptolemy,
which depended on the visual cone, consisting of rectilinear rays emanating
from an apex in the eye to a base in the visual field? Is it possible to have
mathematical analysis without positing the visual cone, and to have the
visual cone without visual rays emanating from the eye? Alhacen answered
the first question in the negative, the second in the affirmative; the visual
cone must be posited, but this can occur within an intromission theory.
Alhacen advanced the following demonstration. Take an arrow, observed
 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
Figure .. A representation of al-Kindi’s (d. ca. ) theory of independent and
incoherent radiation in all directions from each point on the surface of the visible
object. Radiation from only two points is shown for the sake of simplicity.
by the eye, as in Figure .. Alhacen argued (here borrowing a conclusion

from Alkindi) that objects radiate not as coherent wholes but as incoherent
collections of points, each point on the surface radiating in all directions
independently of the others. As a result, every point of the eye receives rays
from every point of the object. And it would seem to follow from this that
any attempt to observe an object would end in total confusion. Clarity of
vision requires order, and order is achieved only if each point of the sensitive
organ of the eye (which Alhacen, following Galen, identified as the crystalline
humor or lens) receives radiation from a single point of the visible object.
In short, a one-to-one correspondence must be established between points
in the visual field and points in the eye, and this is precisely what the visual
cone of the extramissionists does.
Yet, Alhacen believed, an intromissionist can obtain the same result. Of
the infinity of rays emanating from the fletching, center, and head of the
arrow in Figure ., only one from each of these three points falls on the
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 
Figure .. The eye and visual cone according to Alhacen’s intromission theory.
Rays from the visible object falling obliquely on the outer surface of the eye are
refracted, thereby weakened, and thus eliminated from serious consideration. The
unrefracted, vision-causing rays, one from each point on the surface of the visible
object (three are shown), are perpendicularly incident on the cornea and front
surface of the crystalline lens/humor. Passing into the crystalline lens, they give
rise to visual perception. Emerging through the back side of the crystalline lens,
they pass through the vitreous humor, and from there into the optic nerve, which
carries them to the optic chiasma in the front of the brain, where rays from the
two eyes join and the act of vision is “completed.”
eye perpendicularly and enters without refraction. All others are refracted
and thereby weakened, and only the lone unrefracted, unweakened ray is
powerful enough to stimulate the visual power in the crystalline humor.
The same is true of radiation issuing from every point of the visible object.
But the collection of unrefracted rays, one from each point on the surface
of the object, forms a cone of rays, directed toward an apex at the center
of the eye. The rays of this cone fall on the front surface of the crystalline
lens configured exactly as are the points of the object from which they
originated, and clarity of vision is explained. Moreover (and this is a cru-
cially important point), with the visual cone come all of the mathematical
 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
Figure .. Anatomy of the eye as conceived by the editor of Alhacen’s great
optical treatise, Opticae Thesaurus, published in its early-thirteenth-century Latin
translation. Basel, .
capabilities of the mathematical tradition of Euclid and Ptolemy. Alhacen has

thus demonstrated that an intromission theory need not be limited to ques-
tions about the nature of light and the causes of vision but can also support all
of the mathematical analysis that had previously been associated exclusively
with Euclidean extramissionism. By adding discussions of the anatomy and
physiology of the eye to this account of vision, Alhacen provided the begin-
nings of a theory that could satisfy the criteria of all three ancient traditions
(Figure .).
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 
THE BEGINNINGS OF PERSPECTIVA IN
THIRTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE
The intellectual life of Europe was dramatically enriched and transformed

in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by the translation of Greek and
Arabic books into Latin (see Burnett, Chapter , this volume). Among
the translated works appearing piecemeal from late in the eleventh century
to early in the thirteenth were nearly all of the Greek and Arabic optical
sources. The translation into Latin of Aristotle’s works, especially his On
the Soul and On Sensation, with Avicenna’s and Averroes’s commentaries,
powerfully reinforced attention to the physical and psychological aspects of
vision. The Liber de causis attributed to Aristotle began to circulate at about
the same time. Averroes’s medical compendium, the Kitāb al-Kulliyāt (Latin
Colliget), and Alkindi’s On Stellar Rays reached readers of Latin during the
s. By the early thirteenth century, Neoplatonic philosophy (which had
absorbed aspects of Aristotelian and Galenic thought) was reaching European
universities from two directions, one Arabic, the other Patristic.
The effect of this influx of new sources was not only to augment but also to
complicate optical knowledge in the West, for the new materials were widely
divergent in both theoretical content and methodology. The first signs that
the newly translated works were exercising a significant influence on the
content and methodology of indigenous Western optical thought appeared
in the writings of the distinguished scholar, later bishop of Lincoln, Robert
Grosseteste (ca. –).
Much of Grosseteste’s education in the liberal arts and medicine occurred
in the schools of the twelfth century, where Neoplatonic philosophy loomed
large, but a crucial portion of his career was also spent at Hereford, then
an intellectual milieu at the forefront of scientific and philosophical learn-
ing, with ready access to newly translated Arabic works. Grosseteste also
acquired a theological education, perhaps at Paris before . Ever inter-
ested in the latest discoveries and ideas, and their applications to Christian
learning, Grosseteste was among the first Latin scholars to bring together an
extensive reading of Patristic literature, Neoplatonic sources (including the
pseudo-Dionysius, whose work he retranslated from Greek to Latin), most
of Aristotle’s writings (Grosseteste translated the Nicomachean Ethics), the
commentaries of Avicenna and Averroes, and Euclid’s and Alkindi’s books
on geometrical optics.
 See also Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, pp. –; and David C. Lindberg,
“Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the West,” in Mathematics and Its Applications to
Science and Natural Philosophy in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Marshall Clagett, ed. Edward
Grant and John E. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –.
 On Grosseteste’s career, see James McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, ); Joseph Goering, “When and Where did Grosseteste Study Theology?” in Robert
Grosseteste: New Perspectives on His Thought and Scholarship, ed. James McEvoy (Turnhout: Brepols,
 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
What Grosseteste learned from his reading of Euclid and Alkindi was the
power of geometry when applied to questions about nature in general and
light and vision in particular. He issued a manifesto to that effect at the
beginning of a little treatise entitled On Lines, Angles, and Figures:
The usefulness of considering lines, angles, and figures is very great, since
it is impossible to understand natural philosophy without them. They are
useful in relation to the universe as a whole and its individual parts. They
are useful also in connection with related properties, such as rectilinear and
circular motion. Indeed, they are useful in relation to activity and receptivity,
whether of matter or sense – and this is so whether in the sense of sight . . . or
in the other senses. . . . Now all causes of natural effects must be expressed
by means of lines, angles, and figures, for otherwise it is impossible to grasp
their explanation.
This declaration is reminiscent of Alkindi’s claim that everything radiates its
force in all directions into suitable recipients, “so that every place in the world
contains rays from everything that has actual existence.” For optics, this
theory meant that every point of a visible object radiates its power or image
in all directions. Alkindi’s doctrine of the universal radiation of force, appro-
priated by Grosseteste, emerged in the latter’s writings as a doctrine that he
called the “multiplication of species.” According to Grosseteste, everything
in the universe acts on its surroundings through the emanation (or “mul-
tiplication,” as he preferred) of its species (or likeness) in all directions. In
choosing to employ the term “species” for what he also called “power” or
“force” (vis or virtus), Grosseteste and those who followed him were convey-
ing the notion of “what is visible,” as in the Latin “speculum” (mirror) and
such English words as “spectacle,” “speculate,” “aspect,” and “perspective.”
Grosseteste was thus treating the radiation of light as the paradigmatic case –
in part because (owing to its visibility) it reveals the workings of other forms
of radiation that are invisible but also because of its cosmic role in the creation
of the universe of concentric spheres. It follows, as one of the fundamen-
tal assumptions of Grosseteste’s natural philosophy, that such radiation is
implicated in all forms of natural causation.
Grosseteste believed that radiation naturally exerts more force on recipients
that it reaches along short, straight lines than on those it reaches by means of
), pp. –; and N. M. Schulman, “Husband, Father, Bishop? Grosseteste in Paris,” Speculum,
 (), –.
 Robert Grosseteste, On Lines, Angles, and Figures, trans. David Lindberg, in A Source Book in
Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), p. .
 Quoting from pp. – of Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny and F. Hudry, “Al-Kindi, De radiis,” Archives
d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge,  (), –.
 Grosseteste believed that God created an original point of light, which diffused itself in all directions,
generating matter and giving rise to the cosmos as we know it. The Plotinian origins of this thesis
are indisputable, although sometimes overlooked, because Grosseteste frequently supports it with
Aristotle’s arguments. See also Lindberg, Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature, pp. xliv–lxvi; and
Richard C. Dales, “Robert Grosseteste’s Views on Astrology,” Mediaeval Studies,  (), –.
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 
longer lines; likewise, the reflection or refraction of rays by a denser medium –
unless that medium has the polished, uniform smoothness of a mirror –
weakens their impact upon objects they subsequently strike. Sounds that are
magnified by reflection from smooth bodies are dissipated by striking rough
surfaces; a planet’s influence on mundane objects waxes or wanes with its
motion through the heavens because the angle of its rays’ incidence on any
given object is altered; and a hot object warms cold objects in its vicinity
more than distant ones by radiating and so sharing its heat. Hence – and, for
Grosseteste, crucially – if we are to understand the diversity of effects within
the recipient (whether that recipient is exterior matter or a sense organ), we
must investigate this radiation by means of “lines, angles, and figures,” in
short, through the application of geometrical methods. In his short treatise
On the Rainbow, Grosseteste attempted to exemplify the application of such
mathematical methods to a specific natural phenomenon.
But the mathematical analysis of light and vision did not exhaust Gros-
seteste’s interests in visual phenomena. Grosseteste was among the earliest
medieval Christian authors to show real appreciation for Avicenna’s treatise
On the Soul, with its important treatments of the psychological aspects of
visual perception. This work provided Grosseteste with a convincing delin-
eation of the interior senses (derived from Nemesius of Emesa) and an
understanding of the process by which visual perception is “completed” in
the brain. According to Grosseteste, what we see with our eyes when we look
at a visible object are light and colors – the latter identified as the original
light of the universe incorporated into transparent material bodies (thus
literally “embodied”). On the object’s surface, colors are its visible aspects
or form, its “species,” and when they are suffused with rays of light, they
generate rays in turn, multiplying (or reproducing) themselves rectilinearly
in all directions. Sight occurs as these visible “species” interact with a visual
spirit made “of the same nature as the sun’s light” that emanates from the
eye.
When, as a result, the eye has received this form, the act of vision is com-
plete, but the work of the interior senses – by which we know what we see –
has not yet begun. Grosseteste enumerated four such senses, locating them
in three cavities or cells of the brain. In the first cell, the forms of an object
sensed by the different external senses are brought together by the “common
sense” and are preserved by the “imagination”; in the middle cell resides the
“estimative sense,” which Grosseteste defined (following Avicenna) as the
power that, for example, enables the lamb to judge the danger presented
by a wolf. The basis for the lamb’s judgment is “intentions” rather than
 See especially Grosseteste, On Lines, Angles, and Figures and On the Rainbow, in Grant, Source Book
in Medieval Science, pp. –.
 Robert Grosseteste, “De operationibus solis,” in James McEvoy, “The Sun as res and signum:
Grosseteste’s Commentary on Ecclesiasticus ch. , vv. –,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et
médiévale,  (), – (the quoted passage is at pp. –).
 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
forms, and these are stored by the brain in the “memory,” within the brain’s
posterior cavity. Like earlier Neoplatonists, Grosseteste also held that we pos-
sess, in addition, an intellect able to experience insights regarding intelligible
objects (such as mathematical objects, forms, universals, or truths) using real
processes precisely like those of corporeal vision.
Grosseteste’s theories no doubt held intrinsic appeal for many of his
readers. But we should not overlook the official positions that he held within
the university and church, for these contributed to the dissemination of his
ideas. Grosseteste was lecturer to the Oxford Franciscans and subsequently
bishop of Lincoln, offices that positioned him to advocate a synthesis of
the Greco-Arabic learning newly available in translation with the wisdom
found in Patristic writings. At about the same time, Grosseteste’s close friend
William of Auvergne, who had similar inclinations, became bishop of Paris –
a position in which he was even better situated to promote the emerging
synthesis. By the time of their deaths (Auvergne’s in , Grosseteste’s in
), Albert the Great and Roger Bacon (the first Latin scholars to boast
a comprehensive mastery of the new Aristotle) were already hard at work,
immersed in the available literature on light and vision.
Albert (ca. –), sometime professor in the Dominican priory at
Cologne and the University of Paris, was a towering figure in thirteenth-
century scholarship. Generations of medieval scholars mined his commen-
taries on the writings of both the pseudo-Dionysius and Aristotle. Lecturing
on the entire corpus of works attributed to Aristotle, Albert commented
at length on Aristotle’s theories of light and color. He was also acquainted
with the optical treatises of Euclid, Alkindi, and Alhacen and influenced in
his understanding of Aristotelian psychology by the works (including the
Canon of Medicine) of Avicenna, whose classification of five internal senses
Albert generally shared. Confronted with the alternative methodologies of
Aristotle, on the one hand, and the Euclidean mathematicians, on the other,
Albert cast his lot firmly with Aristotle. In his paraphrase of Aristotle’s Meta-
physics, Albert wrote: “We must beware of the error of Plato, who said that
natural things are based on mathematical things and mathematical things on
divine things, just as the third cause is based on the second and the second
on the first; and therefore he said that the principles of natural things are
mathematical, which is altogether false.” Albert certainly did not intend
to forbid the mathematical analysis of radiation; indeed, he engaged in such
 Robert Grosseteste, Commentarius in posteriorum analyticorum libros, II., ed. Pietro Rossi (Florence:
Olschki, ), p. ; and McEvoy, Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, pp. –.
 See Steven Marrone, “Metaphysics and Science in the Thirteenth Century: William of Auvergne,
Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon,” in Medieval Philosophy, ed. John Marenbon (London:
Routledge, ), pp. –.
 Albertus Magnus, Opera omnia, ed. Bernhard Geyer,  vols. (Münster: –), vol. , pt. , p. ,
lines –. In addition to James A. Weisheipl, ed., Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative
Essays (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, ), see Lindberg, Theories of Vision
from Al-Kindi to Kepler, pp. –, on Albert’s optics.
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 
analysis on a limited scale himself. But he firmly believed that the central
issues in the study of light and vision had to do with physical natures and
must be approached through natures and causes.
THE BACONIAN SYNTHESIS
Nobody contributed more to the development of the science of perspectiva

in the West than Roger Bacon (ca. /–ca. ). On the method-
ological issues that separated Grosseteste and Albert the Great, Bacon dis-
missed Albert’s opinion nearly as enthusiastically as he praised Grosseteste’s.
Although Bacon did not study under Grosseteste, and may never even have
met him, he did have access to Grosseteste’s library, left to the Franciscan
convent in Oxford, and was clearly inspired by his example. However, Bacon
was also powerfully moved by sources that had been unavailable to Gros-
seteste, principally the optical works of Ptolemy and Alhacen, where the
promise of geometrical optics had been much more completely fulfilled.
Thus Bacon, even more than Grosseteste, became an apostle of the appli-
cation of mathematical method as the gate and key to all subjects, claiming,
for example, that “no science can be grasped without this science [mathemat-
ics], and . . . nobody can perceive his ignorance in other sciences unless he
is excellently informed in this one. Nor can things of this world be known,
nor can man grasp the uses of body and things, unless he is imbued with
the mighty works of this science.” Despite Bacon’s rhetoric in this passage,
he actually advocated a scientific methodology that coupled a Neoplatonic
conviction that the universe is mathematically structured and can be math-
ematically deciphered with a more Aristotelian expectation that scientific
understanding must also be empirically grounded in (or tested against) what
the senses experience.
It is, of course, one thing to promote a methodological program but quite
another to practice it. Did Bacon consistently practice the mathematization
of light and vision? The answer is a qualified and complicated “yes.” Fol-
lowing Alhacen’s lead, he applied geometrical analysis to optical phenomena
wherever promising and possible, given the conceptual framework and the
 Lindberg, Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature; Lindberg, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva
in the Middle Ages; and David C. Lindberg, “Roger Bacon on Light, Vision, and the Universal
Emanation of Force,” in Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. Jeremiah Hackett
(Leiden: Brill, ), pp. –.
 Roger Bacon, Communia mathematica, in Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi,  fascicules, ed.
Robert Steele and Ferdinand M. Delorme (Oxford: Clarendon Press, –), fasc. , p. . For
similar remarks, see Roger Bacon, Opus maius, pt. .., in The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, ed.
John H. Bridges,  vols. (London: Williams and Norgate, ), vol. , pp. –. On Bacon and
the application of mathematics to optical phenomena, see Lindberg, Roger Bacon and the Origins
of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages, pp. xlii–lii; and Lindberg, “Roger Bacon and the Origins of
Perspectiva in the West,” pp. –.
 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
mathematical techniques available to him, thereby pushing the mathemati-
zation of light and vision as far as it would go before the seventeenth century.
Yet his mathematical analysis, though generally successful, was not flawless,
and there were aspects of optical theory that simply were not vulnerable
to a mathematical assault. The Aristotelian side of Bacon that aspired to
nonmathematical causal knowledge was also a player in the game.
Several examples will serve as illustrations. First, the magnitude of Bacon’s
commitment to a mathematical analysis is superficially apparent from a
glance at his Perspectiva, which contains fifty-one geometrical diagrams, or
his On the Multiplication of Species, which contains thirty-nine, all fully
integrated into the argument of their respective treatises. Second, Bacon’s
works reveal a complete mastery of the geometry of reflection and image-
formation in plane, convex, and concave mirrors. Bacon understood, of
course, that in reflection the angles of incidence and reflection are equal, and
he knew that the image of an object seen by reflection is situated where the
backward, rectilinear extension of the reflected ray reaching the eye intersects
the perpendicular drawn from the visible object to the reflecting surface
(Figure .). He revealed an impressive understanding of the magnification
and diminution of images seen by reflection or refraction, and the concept
of focal point or focal plane is implicit in his analysis of convex spherical
mirrors.
We can see the depth of Bacon’s commitment to the mathematization
of optical phenomena in a third example – Bacon’s remarkable supposition
(following Alhacen) that the visual apparatus and the very act of vision will
submit to geometrical analysis. According to Bacon, all of the tunics and
humors of the eye (cornea, crystalline lens, aqueous and vitreous humors,
and retina) are defined or enclosed by spherical surfaces, the centers of
which are situated on a straight line running from the center of the pupil
at the front to the opening into the optic nerve at the back. He believed,
as Alhacen had taught, that only rays incident on the eye perpendicularly,
which enter it without refraction, are capable of stimulating the eye’s visual
capabilities. These perpendicular rays form a cone or pyramid extending
from the visual object as base toward an apex (which the rays never actually
achieve) at the center of the observer’s eye (Figure .). The rays that
make up this visual cone pass without refraction through the cornea and
front surface of the crystalline lens (which are concentric, so that a ray
perpendicular to the one will be perpendicular to the other. At the rear
surface of the crystalline lens, they are refracted in such a way as to be
projected through the opening of the optic nerve, which conducts them to
its point of union with the other optic nerve (our optic chiasma). There
the completion of vision occurs, as the species from the two eyes join to
form a single image. That image, in turn, continues to multiply itself into
 Lindberg, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages, pp. xliv–xlv.
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 
the three chambers of the brain that house the five inner senses defined
in Avicenna’s On the Soul. Although Bacon’s theory contains much more
detail, a striking feature of his quest to understand the act of vision is his
willingness (following Alkindi, Grosseteste, and especially Alhacen) to extend
mathematical analysis to something so apparently unmathematical as human
anatomy.
Mathematical analysis was only one prong of Bacon’s methodological cam-
paign. The other – his Aristotelian side, reinforced by Alhacen’s example –
was the practice of what he called “experimental science,” the aspect of
his scientific work on which his reputation as one of the most original of
medieval scholars primarily rests. Among Bacon’s many proclamations on
the subject of experimental science were arguments for its epistemological
authority as the mistress to whom the other sciences, her handmaidens,
owed obedience. But is the reputation deserved? And how thoroughly did
perspectiva become an experimental science in Bacon’s hands?
We do not have space here to probe deeply into the vexed question of the
meaning of “experiment” in Bacon’s work, but on any definition his theories
of light and vision were not primarily the products of experimental investi-
gation. Bacon proceeded as natural scientists have nearly always proceeded,
by borrowing from the past and constructing a theoretical framework from
inherited materials. His overarching goal was not originality but truth, and
he had every reason to suppose that each of the available authorities –
Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen, Augustine, H . unayn ibn Ish.āq,
Alkindi, Avicenna, Alhacen, and Grosseteste – possessed some portion of
the truth. None was wrong, but some were incomplete, and others had been
misunderstood.
Nevertheless, it does not follow that Bacon imitated his guides uncritically.
He recognized that authorities had to be interpreted, criticized, and corrected,
disputes had to be adjudicated, choices made, and compromises worked out,
and all of this could be done without depriving them of their authoritative
status. What emerged was Bacon’s considered opinion on the matters at
issue.
In the end, any theory had to pass the tests of reason and experience.
Bacon exhibited no reluctance toward bringing observational experience to
bear on his theories of light and vision. Indeed, a few of his observations can
be confidently attributed to contrived experiments employing instruments.
The clearest evidence of such an experiment is the value of ◦ for the
maximum elevation (also radius) of the rainbow, first expressed by Bacon and
therefore, we may reasonably assume, the product of his own measurements,
probably using an astrolabe.
 Ibid., pp. xlvi–xlviii, –; and A. Mark Smith, “Getting the Big Picture in Perspectivist Optics,”
Isis,  (), –.
 See especially Bacon, Opus maius, vol. , pp. –.
 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
That said, historians have no adequate window on Bacon’s actual scientific
practices. The evidence at our disposal is limited to texts that Bacon wrote
(occupying about two feet of bookshelf in their nineteenth- and twentieth-
century editions), and, apart from a few exceptional cases like the elevation of
the rainbow, what they reveal are the functions that empirical data perform
in his scientific arguments. A handful of his optical observations are intended
simply to discover or verify factual data, with no direct bearing on optical
theories. Most, however, serve some theoretical function, such as confirming,
refuting, or challenging a theoretical belief. The best of many examples is
Bacon’s attempt to devise a test of Alhacen’s claim that, although vision is
primarily the result of rays incident perpendicularly on the eye, which enter
without refraction, rays that are nonperpendicular (and therefore refracted)
also play some role. To prove this point, he proposes that we place a thin
straw in our visual field between our eye and a visible object. Since the
straw must intercept perpendicular rays from some parts of the object, and
since, despite the presence of the straw, we perceive the entire object, it is
evident that nonperpendicular rays are (under such circumstances) visually
efficacious.
Finally, complicating any taking of Bacon’s methodological temperature
is the fact that his optical writings were not research monographs but polem-
ical persuasiones, meant to reveal to a nonspecialist audience the awesome
possibilities of optical knowledge through a survey of its contents. In that
effort, Bacon displayed his remarkable ability to synthesize the disparate
sources available to him. For example, his sources presented him with a
variety of apparently incompatible theories of the nature of light, including
Plato’s “visual fire,” Aristotle’s actualization of the potential transparency of
the medium, Alkindi’s universal propagation of force, Alhacen’s “forms” of
light and color, and Grosseteste’s “species.” Bacon’s solution was to over-
look the differences. Plato’s hypothesis of visual fire (which had experienced
something of a revival in the twelfth century) was too vague to cause any
trouble, and Bacon found that he could successfully merge the others. He
took Grosseteste’s species, assigned them all of the properties and functions
of Alhacen’s forms, claimed that this was what Aristotle had in mind, and
agreed that they radiate in all directions from every point of every visible
object, as Alkindi had proposed. Anything that can be described in so few
words may seem simple, but in fact Bacon devoted great effort and a treatise
of , words, entitled On the Multiplication of Species, to the project. In
this treatise, he developed the ideas of Alkindi and Grosseteste in exquisite
detail – defining species as likenesses of the agents from which they issue,
 Bacon’s experimental practice is treated more fully in Jeremiah Hackett, “Roger Bacon on Scientia
experimentalis,” in Hackett, Roger Bacon and the Sciences, pp. –. On perspectival experimen-
tation, see David C. Lindberg, “Bacon on Light, Vision, and the Universal Emanation of Force,”
in Hackett, Roger Bacon and the Sciences, pp. –; and Lindberg, Roger Bacon and the Origins of
Perspectiva in the Middle Ages, pp. lii–lxvii.
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 
maintaining that all natural causation requires them, working out in detail
the mathematics and physics of their propagation, and specifying their role
as agents of visual perception.
But in what direction are the species responsible for vision propagated?
Here the alternatives were stark. Either vision occurs by extramitted rays, as
Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen, Hunayn ibn Ishāq, and Alkindi all maintained; by
intromitted rays, as Aristotle, Alhacen, Avicenna, and Averroes insisted; or
by some mechanism involving a two-way transmission, as in the theories of
Plato, St. Augustine, and Grosseteste. Bacon was a convert to the intromis-
sionist gospel, thanks to Aristotle, Avicenna, and Alhacen. He joined them
in arguing that intromitted species are necessary for vision and its principal
cause; the senses (as Aristotle pointed out in a passage quoted by Bacon) are
initially passive recipients, whereas the species of the visible object are the
agents.
However, convinced that our senses are active as well as passive, Bacon
was unwilling to dismiss the extramissionist position. Moreover, extramis-
sionists were able to advance persuasive arguments and relevant empirical
evidence, such as the (alleged) ability of cats to see in the dark. Bacon escaped
the dilemma by noticing that Alhacen, Avicenna, and Averroes had proved
the necessity, and therefore the existence, of intromitted rays without ever
demonstrating the nonexistence of extramitted ones. This allowed Bacon
to concede that intromitted rays are the immediate cause of vision (as the
intromissionists insist) while acknowledging that extramitted rays also exist
(as the extramissionists maintain) and perform the ancillary function of
“ennobling” the medium and the incoming species, thus rendering the latter
capable of “completing its action” on an animated body such as the eye.
According to Bacon’s understanding of Galen, the optic nerves are hollow
tubes descending from the brain that can accommodate the two-way traffic
of extramission and intromission.
THE RAINBOW AND ITS COLORS
Rainbows – spectacular natural phenomena as well as symbols of God’s

promise to Noah – could hardly be overlooked by medieval scholars claim-
ing an interest in light and vision. Their starting point was Aristotle’s Mete-
orologica, where the rainbow was attributed to the reflection of solar light
 For a critical edition, English translation, and analysis of this treatise, see Lindberg, Roger Bacon’s
Philosophy of Nature. A shorter analysis appears in Lindberg, “Roger Bacon on Light, Vision, and
the Universal Emanation of Force,” pp. –.
 An argument can be offered for classifying Galen and H . unayn with those who defended a two-
way transmission since they required the air (which has been transformed by visual spirit into an
extension of the optic nerve) to return its impressions to the eye and brain.
 Lindberg, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages, pp. lxxxiii–lxxxvi.
 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
in a cloud, with colors emerging as a result of variable weakening of that
solar light by reflection and transmission through the nebular mists. Aristotle
also treated the geometry of the rainbow, concluding (for example) that a
straight line connects the Sun, the observer, and the center of curvature of
the rainbow.
One of the first medieval scholars to take a serious interest in the rainbow
after Aristotle’s works became available in translation was Robert Grosseteste.
In a short work entitled De iride, composed early in the thirteenth century,
he dismissed Aristotle’s reflection theory on the grounds that reflection in
a hollow cloud could not explain the rainbow’s shape. He urged instead
that the rainbow is the product of multiple refractions in the cloud and its
mists – considered holistically rather than as a collection of discrete drops of
moisture.
Grosseteste’s De iride devoted fewer than , words to the rainbow.
Roger Bacon, writing some thirty to forty years later and doubtless aware
of Grosseteste’s little treatise, allocated about , words to the subject in
his Opus maius. The context of Bacon’s discussion was the power of what
he called “experimental science,” with the rainbow as his primary example.
One observational result, mentioned earlier, was the universal ◦ radius
of the rainbow. As for the rainbow’s cause, Bacon completely discounted
Grosseteste’s argument on behalf of holistic refraction, insisting that the key
was to be found in the individual droplets of moisture in the cloud (perhaps
following Albertus Magnus on this point). The causal importance of these
droplets was evident, Bacon argued, from the fact that if the observer of a
rainbow walks toward the rainbow, it recedes from him; if he withdraws, it
follows him; and if he moves sideways, the rainbow does the same. From this
Bacon concluded that if there are multiple observers, each sees a different
rainbow. And that can be true only if, for each of them, the rainbow is
produced by a different set of droplets. As for what happens in these droplets,
Bacon did not see how refraction could produce the known phenomena of
the rainbow. He argued instead for reflection from small drops “infinite in
number” descending from a cloud, from each of which “reflection occurs as
from a spherical mirror.”
Early in the fourteenth century, a Dominican friar, Theodoric of Freiberg
(d. ca. ), followed Bacon in opting for the importance of individual
drops. In one of the most remarkable experimental investigations of the
Middle Ages, Theodoric projected rays of light through crystalline spheres
and water-filled flasks, meant to simulate the passage of sunlight through a
drop of moisture in a rain cloud. He concluded that the primary bow resulted
from refraction as a solar ray entered the raindrop, an internal reflection at
 Aristotle, Meteorologica, III..a–b.
 For a translation of this treatise, see Grant, Source Book in Medieval Science, pp. –.
 Bacon, Opus maius, vol. , p. . See also David C. Lindberg, “Roger Bacon’s Theory of the
Rainbow: Progress or Regress?” Isis,  (), –.
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 
Figure .. Theodoric of Freiberg (d. ca. ) on the rainbow. The drawing shows
four small circles, representing droplets of moisture within a cloud responsible for
the rainbow. The Sun (A) is on the horizon at the lower left; the observer is at
C, the center of the large semicircle. The paths of two solar rays are represented in
the uppermost droplet, refracted as the light enters it (L, N ) and again as it leaves
it (Z, T), following a total internal reflection at the back of the same droplet. This
happens to be exactly how the rainbow is formed.
the back of the raindrop, and a second refraction as it emerged from the
raindrop (Figure .). To explain the secondary rainbow, Theodoric added
a second internal reflection within the raindrop. Whether Descartes (with
whom this theory became a permanent piece of meteorological knowledge,
still valid) borrowed the idea from Theodoric is open to conjecture.
COLORS, APPEARANCES, AND THE KNOWABILITY

OF THE WORLD
Theorizing about the rainbow might seem from the foregoing account to
have been concerned exclusively with reflection and refraction, treated geo-
metrically wherever possible. But the rainbow also provided ancient and
medieval scholars with an occasion and an opportunity for discussing the
nature and number of colors and, in the process, for raising important
perceptual and epistemological questions.
 William A. Wallace, “Dietrich von Freiberg,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, IV, –.
 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
The number of colors in the rainbow had long been a matter of dispute.
In his Meteorologica, Aristotle had asserted that there are three “irreducible”
(or primary) colors, the “crimson, leek-green, and purple” visible in the
rainbow. In his De sensu, however, he added “deep blue” to the primaries
and located them in a scale of seven colors, ranging from darkness (black)
to clarity (white). Complicating matters for Aristotle’s interpreters was the
difficulty experienced by his medieval translators in deciding exactly which
pure colors Aristotle’s Greek vocabulary designated and hence which Latin
names should be employed. Various thirteenth-century scholars, including
Grosseteste, Bacon, the Franciscan encyclopedist Bartholomeus Anglicus (d.
), the Dominicans Vincent of Beauvais (d. ), Albert the Great, and
Theodoric of Freiberg, attempted to make sense of Aristotelian color theory
and to reconcile it with the theories of other ancient authorities. Bacon’s
three-value color scale – white and black at the extremes, ruby-red at the
midpoint between them – became popular but not universal.
The issue of the number of primary colors is closely related to a second
question. Are all the colors that we see objective features of the physical
world, or are some created within our perceptual apparatus? If, as Bacon
had pointed out, no two observers see the same rainbow, it follows that
the colors that had seemed to be objective and extramental were in fact at
least partially subjective phenomena – differing, in his view, from the “true”
colors produced when solar rays pass through crystal. Bacon also pointed to
the iridescent colors visible in peacocks’ tails and pigeons’ necks and shifting
spectra projected upon a wall, which he believed had “more an appearance of
true color than its existence.” Nonetheless, he regarded such phenomena
as exceptional.
Peter Auriol (d. ), a Franciscan belonging to the generation after
Bacon, had quite a different opinion. He formulated the critical question as
follows:
Those who ask concerning the colors of a rainbow, or the colors that are in
the neck of a dove, or an image that appears in a mirror, or a candle appearing
somewhere other than in its true location, whether these have real being
or only intentional being, mean to ask whether these have only subjective
and fictitious or apparent being, or whether they have real and fixed being
externally in the nature of things, independent of any apprehension.
 Aristotle, De sensu et sensato, –; Aristotle, Meteorologica, III..b–a and also III..a–;
Roger Bacon, De sensu et sensato, in Steele and Delorme, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, fasc.
, pp. –.
 Roger Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum, I., lines –, in Lindberg, Roger Bacon’s Philosophy
of Nature, pp. – (see p. , line , for the quoted words). See also Roger Bacon, Perspectiva,
III, dist. , chap. , in Lindberg, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages, p.
, lines –; and Bacon, Opus maius, VI (“Scientia Experimentalis), chap. , in Bridges, The
Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, vol. , pp. –.
 Auriol, Scriptum in primum librum Sententiarum, quoted in Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age
of Ockham, pp. – n. .
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 
Auriol’s controversial answer – that these appearances have no extramental
existence – made him famous for generations of theologians. What Bacon
and other perspectivists had thought the observer’s perceptual powers some-
times do, Auriol held, they always do in the act of vision, veridical or not –
they actively form purely subjective conceptions that appear like, and thereby
represent, that object. Contents of the mind are not unreal entities, Auriol
insisted, but they have a kind of existence that is “diminished,” “intentional,”
or “apparent.” Auriol was without followers, apart from the Franciscan the-
ologian Bernard of Arezzo (fl. ). A broad philosophical movement pre-
pared to accept and exploit skeptical arguments such as Auriol’s had to await
the sixteenth century.
THE DIFFUSION OF PERSPECTIVA

AFTER ROGER BACON
Bacon produced his optical works in haste and semisecrecy – not because
anybody considered the subject matter dangerous but because in their very
composition Bacon had broken prohibitions of the Franciscan Order against
writing books on any subject without permission. He then dispatched them
to Pope Clement IV, who had asked to see them. We do not know whether
Clement approved of them or even read them, but in the long run they
inspired an optical tradition that gave rise to commentaries and competing
texts and entered the mainstream of university education, becoming the
intellectual property of generations of European scholars.
The first fruits of Bacon’s influence are seen in two optical texts written
in the s, about a decade after Bacon composed his De multiplicatione
specierum and Perspectiva. Probably the first was an enormous volume enti-
tled Perspectiva, written by a Silesian cleric named Witelo (d. after ),
who probably learned of Bacon’s work through his affiliation with the papal
court. Witelo’s Perspectiva, consisting of about , words and contain-
ing nearly  geometrical figures (ten times the , words and  figures
of Bacon’s Perspectiva), was meant as an exhaustive, systematic account of
the new discipline, borrowing freely from Bacon, Alhacen, and other sources
in the perspectivist tradition.
Whereas Witelo aimed for completeness, the second text inspired by Bacon
was a teaching text, written for brevity and accessibility by an English Francis-
can and future archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham (ca. /–).
After teaching theology at Paris, Pecham was appointed to do the same at
 On Auriol’s theory of knowledge and apparent being, see Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of
Ockham, pp. –.
 See Vitellonis opticae, printed with Alhacen’s Optica under the title Opticae thesaurus, ed. Friedrich
Risner (Basel: Eusebius Episcopius, ), reprinted with an introduction by David C. Lindberg
(New York: Johnson Reprint, ).
 David C. Lindberg and Katherine H. Tachau
the papal curia in Viterbo, where he likely encountered Witelo in person
as well as Bacon’s writings (if he had not already seen them in Paris). Writ-
ten probably for Pecham’s own students, his text, the Perspectiva communis,
became in the long run the most widely used textbook on the subject in
the universities of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Along with the works
of Euclid, Alkindi, Alhacen, Bacon, and Witelo, it conveyed the basics of
the discipline (especially its mathematical aspects) to generations of scholars
until the early decades of the seventeenth century. Evidence of the strength of
this optical tradition in the intervening centuries is found in the writings of
Jean Buridan, Dominicus de Clavasio, Nicole Oresme, Henry of Langenstein
(d. ), Biagio Pelacani da Parma (d. ), and many others.
Among the scholars whom Bacon influenced, Pecham, Auriol, and
Theodoric of Freiberg were not unusual in being theologians. Through
its application to issues of sensation and cognition, perspectiva spoke to epis-
temological questions salient among theologians. Fellow Franciscans such as
Roger Marston, Guillaume de la Mare, Matthew of Aquasparta, and Peter
Olivi (all at Paris) absorbed (or criticized) perspectivist tenets in the thir-
teenth century, as did John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham in the
fourteenth. Others who revealed the influence of perspectiva were Nicole
Oresme, Henry of Langenstein, and Robert Holcot.
The influence of the medieval perspectivist tradition did not end here
but continued well into the seventeenth century. Alhacen’s De aspectibus was
printed in , Bacon’s Perspectiva in , Witelo’s Perspectiva in , ,
and , and Pecham’s Perspectiva communis in ten editions between  and
. A measure of the influence of these four authors is the frequency of cita-
tions of their books in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific writings
by Leonardo da Vinci, Regiomontanus, Giambattista della Porta, Francesco
Maurolico, Tycho Brahe, Michael Maestlin, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei,
William Gilbert, Christopher Scheiner, Ismaêl Boulliau, Thomas Harriot,
Willebrord Snell, René Descartes, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, and Isaac Bar-
row (to name only the best known). Most remarkably, Kepler’s theory of the
retinal image – the most important optical innovation of the first half of
the seventeenth century – represents the culmination, rather than a repudi-
ation, of the medieval perspectivist tradition. Such a claim is not intended
to question Kepler’s originality or diminish its luster but rather to identify
the foundation on which he built and the source materials that he employed
 David C. Lindberg, ed. and trans., John Pecham and the Science of Optics: Perspectiva communis
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ).
 David C. Lindberg, A Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Optical Manuscripts (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, ); and Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler,
pp. –.
 Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham, passim.
The Science of Light and Color, Seeing and Knowing 

in his creation of a new theory of how we see. Tracing the influence of
the medieval perspectivist tradition shows that it contained the theoretical
and factual resources that later scholars exploited (not without alteration,
of course, but nonetheless recognizably) to fuel the optical innovations of
seventeenth-century optical practitioners.
 See especially Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, pp. –.

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

THE SCIENCE OF LIGHT AND COLOR,

It seemed clear to Aristotle (– b.c.) that perception, no matter which

THE ISLAMIC CONTRIBUTION

Although scholars in early-medieval Christian Europe had only fragmentary

by the eye, as in Figure .. Alhacen argued (here borrowing a conclusion

capabilities of the mathematical tradition of Euclid and Ptolemy. Alhacen has

The intellectual life of Europe was dramatically enriched and transformed

THE BACONIAN SYNTHESIS

Nobody contributed more to the development of the science of perspectiva

THE RAINBOW AND ITS COLORS

Rainbows – spectacular natural phenomena as well as symbols of God’s

COLORS, APPEARANCES, AND THE KNOWABILITY

THE DIFFUSION OF PERSPECTIVA

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