The historian Alan MacFarlane writes of the role of glass in shaping artistic vision, “It is as if all humans had some kind of systematic myopia, but one which made it impossible to see, and particularly to represent, the natural world with precision and clarity. Humans normally saw nature symbolically, as a set of signs. . . . What glass ironically did was to take away or compensate for the dark glass of human sight and the distortions of the mind, and hence to let in more light.”
