1145
problems. Ponti then handed Bresolin’s studio over to
Giovanni Brusa. Antonio Fortunato Perini collaborated
with Carlo Ponti after 1854, and he probably did some
of the photographs in the catalogue Ponti presented
at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. Perini
was among the fi rst to open a photographic studio in
Venice and to spread the albumen print technique.
He was especially concerned with the photographic
reproduction of the manuscripts and miniatures in the
Biblioteca Marciana.
Carlo Naya opened his photographic establishment
in Venice in 1857. He worked with Ponti from that time
onwards, furnishing Ponti’s shop with photographic
prints which were often pubished by Ponti with his own
trade mark, and, as in the case of Bresolin, considerable
confusion occurred in this case, too. Together with Ponti,
he also published several albums of views, among which
were the Vedute di Venezia, which came out the day after
the Veneto was annexed to Italy in 1866.
Ponti did his photographs between 1854 and 1875. He
took shots not only of Venice, but also of other places in
northern Italy, and, between 1860 and 1865, Rome. He
published other catalogues of his works, the Catalogo di
fotografi e delle principali vedute in 1864 and, in 1872,
the Catalogo generale delle fotografi e.
In 1860, he created a special viewer for large format
photographs, the Aletoscopio (from the Greek: “precise
view”). In 1861 he presented it to the Société française
de photographie and, on 14 April of the same year, to
the Istituto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice, where
he earned honourable mention in May. On 11 January
1862 Carlo Ponti obtained sole rights for his invention
and began to sell it. Later, he created different vari-
ants, like the Megaletoscopio, a bigger version of the
Aletoscopio, which he had fi nished in 1862. For the
new invention, he was awarded the Grand Prix at the
Great International Exhibition in London that year. He
registered the trade mark on 10 July of the same year,
entrusted the manufacture of the apparatus to the cabi-
net maker Demetrio Puppolin and then promoted sales.
He also made a special version of the Megaletoscopio,
the Megaletoscopio privilegiato, to see slightly curved
photographs. Both the Aletoscopio and the Megale-
toscopio—and their variants—made it possible to see
the same images enlarged by lenses, and with two dif-
ferent effects: the “day effect,” with refl ected light, and
the “night effect,” in transparency. In this last case, the
photograph was reinforced on the back by other sheets of
paper painted in different colours and pierced with little
holes. The whole, illuminated from the back, changed
the colours and light of the positive image, creating a
“night effect.”
In 1866 Carlo Ponti became the offi cial photogra-
pher of His Majesty Vittorio Emanuele II, when the
Veneto became part of the Italian nation. His growing
business enabled him to open branches in other cities:
Paris, London, Liverpool, Berlin, Stuttgart, Lyons,
New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Montreal,
and San Francisco. At this time Ponti lost sole rights
on the sales of the Aletoscopio and its variants because
of the administrative uncertainty in which the Veneto
found itself in the years following the annexation. In
fact, an apparatus now housed in the Musée Suisse de
l’Appareil Photographique in Vevey bears the trademark
of Carlo Naya, who, copying Ponti’s models, had begun
to manufacture and sell the Aletoscopio. This initiative
got him involved in a long legal battle in 1868, and
Ponti used every means he could to get Naya sentenced.
From 1868 onwards, then, the collaboration between
the two photographers stopped. Until 1876 Ponti tried
to get back sole rights on his creation, but without any
success. He made, however, countless variations on his
fi rst apparatus, and gave them highly original names:
Amfoteroscopio, Dioramoscopio, Pontioscopio, Cos-
morama Fotografi co are only a few examples.
The invention of the Aletoscopio must be placed to-
gether with those inventions that, slowly and well before
the 19th century, led from the static image to the image
as something with movement, and, to cinema. Ponti
played an active part in this story, from the moment that
stereoscopic photography began to be widespread and
the subsequent experiments that increasingly expanded
the potential range of expression of photographic im-
ages.
Carlo Ponti died in Venice on 16 November 1893; he
was blind by that time, but had spent many long years
of his life in a profession he had taken up out of passion
and honesty.
The Museé Suisse de l’Appareil Photographique in
Vevey houses an exemplar of the Megaletoscopio, ac-
companied by twenty albumen prints attributed partly to
him and partly to Carlo Naya. More of his photographs
are in public and private collections (Fototeca della
Soprintendenza per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico e
Demoetnoantropologico, Brera, Milan; Museo di Sto-
ria della Fotografi a Fratelli Alinari, Florence; Dietmar
Siegert Collection, Münich; Wilfried Wiegand Collec-
tion, Frankfurt am Main; Department of Photography,
J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu).
Silvia PaoliBiography
Carlo Ponti was born in Sagno (Canton Ticino) some-
time between 1822 and 1824, and died in Venice on 16
November 1893, by which time he was already totally
blind. At present, research has not turned up very much
about his life or training. We only know that he went
to the Cauchoix studio in Paris for fi ve years, studying
as an optician and photographer. He set up residence in