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MOVEMENT IN TWO DIMENSIONS
Although Cellini says that he was frightened during this second visit to the Colosseum, his account is not that of a man who believes he has been in touch with supernatural powers. In order to reassure the terrified boy he tells him that what he saw was 'only smoke and shade', and this suggests that the sculptor may have suspected something of the nature of the deception. This conclusion is borne out by the fact that a day or two later the necromancer tried in vain to interest Cellini in a project to accompany him as his paid assistant to a particular spot in the mountains of Norcia, where he promised to show him manifestations of a much more surprising character. He may have intended to combine his conjuring with the natural effects of reflection from concave surfaces sometimes witnessed in mountainous places. The Reverend T. S. Hughes, travelling in Sicily in 1830, noted that 'at the extremity of the vast shadow which Etna projects across the island appeared a perfect and distinct image of the mountain itself, elevated above the horizon and diminished, as if viewed in a convex mirror'. Many travellers have described the eerie appearance of the Spectre of the Brock en, the reflected spectrum of the observer upon the highest point of the Harz Mountains; and no one who has read it will be likely to forget James Hogg's remarkable evocation in The Confessions of a Justified Sinner of the giant shadow projected on to the morning mist from Arthur's Seat.
It is clear that skill was needed to create illusions by means of concave mirrors alone and that only an unsophisticated audience could be completely hoodwinked. But with the invention of the magic lantern in the seventeenth century, magicians were supplied with a tool which immensely enhanced their powers of producing convincing phantasms.
The magic lantern was invented by Athanasius Kircher in about 1640 and he outlines its principles in his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, first published in 1645. Kircher was a scientist of considerable repute, but he was also a Jesuit priest and from the little that is known about him he seems to have had much in common with the magician-priests of earlier ages. He discloses the same talent for showmanship, the same power of exciting and terrifying his audiences, and it was he who applied the epithet 'magic' to his apparatus.
The spectators of Kircher's shows were not placed as they usually were in
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