The Magic Lantern and Moving Images before 1800 by Deac Rossell [published in Barockberichte (Salzburg), 40-41 (August 2005), pp. 686-693] In early July 1672, the Parisian medical doctor and antiquarian Charles Patin visited Nürnberg and saw a magic lantern show. Patin had fled Paris in 1667 when a satirical pamphlet about the new mistress of King Louis XIV, Mme. de Montespan, was discovered by the French authorities in a package of books he had smuggled into Paris from The Netherlands. Fleeing the country before he was sentenced in absentia in February 1668 to lifelong service in the galleys of the French Navy, Patin spent the years 1667 through 1672 travelling across Europe visiting noble courts and learned scientists, collecting medals and coins, and searching out the most interesting rarities and amusing curiosities. Before settling in Basel his travels took him from Vienna to Hungary and Bohemia, across Bavaria and down the Rhein to Mainz and Cologne, from Berlin to Jena, Leipzig, Dresden and Salzburg. His host in 1 Nürnberg was a friend of his father’s, Johann Georg Volckamer the elder, who kept up an international correspondence as president of the Leopoldina and who was a leading figure in the city’s intellectual and cultural life. Patin examined his host’s large collection of antique coins and medals, saw the impressive group of weapons and paintings gathered by Johann Andreas Viatis, and spent some time browsing in the library of rare medical and philosophical books owned by the apothecary Johann Leonhard Stöberlein. “There are many Learned men in this City; Antiquity, History, Politicks, Eloquence, and the Mechanical Arts are there in flourishing State,” Patin wrote in Quatre Relations historiques, a series of four letters on his travels that were 2 first published in 1673. It was Volckamer who recommended the magic lantern show to Patin, a show produced by a recent addition to Nürnberg society: a former Capuchin monk who converted to the Lutheran confession and was now an optical instrument dealer and manufacturer named Johann Franz Griendel. Patin was most impressed by Griendel and his exhibition, calling him “absolutely Master of the most abstruse Secrets in Opticks” and saying that “there never was in the World a greater Magitian than he.” Patin’s description of Griendel’s magic lantern show is the most 3 extensive surviving account of a 17 century magic lantern presentation. “For it th