For the past few days, I have been working on a long essay on the anatomy of the eye and the importance of the crystalline humor in early modern elite and popular discourses on sight, but I took some time away from editing to play around with both Flash and a digital edition of George Bartish’s splendid 1583 work on the diseases of the eye, the Ophthalmodouleia Das ist Augendienst.

A full-text digital edition of Bartisch’s work with some very high quality scans can be found here courtesy of the Internet Archive.

While I had seen some of the images from the Opthalmodoulia before reproduced in secondary sources, I had never seen a copy of the complete text before today, and, consequently, was unaware that the text also contained a woodcut of ocular anatomy with moveable flaps. Since I have been messing around with Flash to produce a few short videos for #WoodcutWednesday, I decided to try my hand at animating Bartisch’s anatomy of the eye.

What follows are two different animations. The first, an interactive animation, requires a Flash player, and the second, a Youtube video, does not have any interactivity but can be played on any device. Enjoy!

I hope to have my work on the crystalline humor posted by early next week.

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