Camara Oscura

This guide to the Camara Oscura in Havana traces a trick roughly twenty-three centuries old, from Ancient Greek observations about light through a small opening to a tenth-century Baghdad scholar who wrote up the principle, and the painters who later used it to trace faces and skylines they could never draw freehand. It follows how the device came to carry Leonardo da Vinci's name long after the idea predated him, and how this particular one arrived astonishingly late, as a gift in 2001 from the provincial government of Cadiz, Spain, built by an English optical workshop. From there it climbs the old Gomez Vila building, finished in 1909, toward the small room near its top.