From sight to light: the passage from ancient to modern optics

The emergence of optics as a science : the Greek and early Greco-Roman background

Ptolemy and the flowering of Greek optics

Greco-Roman and early Arabic developments

Alhacen and the grand synthesis

Developments in the medieval Latin West

The assimilation of perspectivist optics during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance

The Keplerian turn and its technical background

The seventeenth-century response.