History of glasses Others

Around 1284 in Italy, Salvino D'Armate is credited with inventing the first wearable
eye glasses. The earliest pictorial evidence for the use of eyeglasses, however, is Tomaso da Modena's 1352 portrait of the cardinal Hugh de Provence reading in a scriptorium. Another early example would be a depiction of eyeglasses found north
of the Alpes in an altarpiece of the church of Bad Wildungen, Germany, in 1403.
(on the picture in left are eyeglasses from 16 century, Germany).

Many theories abound for who should be credited for the invention of traditional eyeglasses. In 1676, Francesco Redi, a professor of medicine at the University
of Pisa, wrote that he possessed a 1289 manuscript whose author complains that
he would be unable to read or write were it not for the recent invention of glasses.

He also produced a record of a sermon given in 1305, in which the speaker, a Dominican monk named
Franco Giordano da Rivalto, remarked that glasses had been invented less than twenty years previously,
and that he had met the inventor. Based on this evidence, Redi credited another Dominican monk, Franco Alessandro da Spina of Pisa, with the re-invention of glasses after their original inventor kept them a secret,
a claim contained in da Spina's obituary record.

Other stories, possibly legendary, credit Roger Bacon with the invention. Bacon is known to
have made the first recorded reference to the magnifying properties of lenses in 1262.
His treatise De iride ("On the Rainbow"), which was written while he was a student of Robert Grosseteste, no later than 1235, mentions using optics to "read the smallest letters at
incredible distances". While the exact date and inventor may be forever disputed, it is almost certainly clear that spectacles were invented between 1280 and 1300 in Italy.
A portrait of Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, 1580–1645.