Cartesian scholarship has, in recent years, enlarged and enriched our understanding of Descartes. It has, first of all, taken a more comprehensive view of the Cartesian corpus, seeing Descartes as not just the philosopher of the Meditations, but also as a natural philosopher, that is, the philosopher-mathematician-scientist who also authored the Regulae, the Dioptrique, the Geometrie and the Principia. Second, it has provided us with more of the context surrounding Descartes; it has looked more carefully into both the scholastic texts and contemporary mathematical and scientific controversies. In the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries however, a whole genre of optical problems were tackled not just by natural philosophers, but also by artists like Da Vinci, Durer, and Niceron. In this paper I begin to connect the history of philosophy with the history of art. In particular, I will show that understanding the artistic experiments and achievements in optics in the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries opens new lines of scholarship that enhance even further our understanding of Descartes’ natural philosophy and, specifically, the role of imagination in his natural philosophy.