Ruth Madeline Ezra

Best thought of as the plastic of its time, the foliaceous mineral mica or “Muscovy glass” assumed a remarkable salience across the intellectual, material, and visual cultures of early modernity. Transparent leaves lent ersatz windows to hand-held fans and embroidered caskets while also providing heat-resistant panes for lanterns and see-through covers for natural history collections. “Leaves of Glass” tells the story of mica’s extraction and circulation in northern Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book considers how mica’s distinct physical properties fed the imaginations of poets, painters, needleworkers, and natural philosophers alike. It offers one chapter in a longer history of transparency as both matter and metaphor in art and science.