The 25th book of Plinius’ Historia Naturalis is one of our most important sources for the history of tradition of knowledge during the Antiquity. Many media historians have worked with this text in reconstructing communicative relations and techniques of the ancient times. All of them state the lack in descriptions of visual experience. The author argues that this state of affairs was not meant to be a default in Plinius’ view. Communication about the visible world without interaction, based exclusively on writing and images, was not conceivable then. The conditions for this communicative goal, so evident to us, were only created in the Renaissance, 1500 years later.