Observations of gravitational lenses

During the last tow years a burst of results has come from radio and optical surveys of ''galaxy lenses'' (where the main deflector is a galaxy). These are reviewed. On the other hand, in September 1985 we pointed out a very strange blue ring-like structure on a Charge-Coupled Device image of the cluster of galaxies Abell 370. This turned out to be Einstein arcs discovery. Following this discovery, new observational results have shown that many rich clusters of galaxies can produce numerous arclets: tangentially distorted images of an extremely faint galaxy population probably located at redshift larger than 1. This new class of gravitational lenses proves to be an important observational topic and this will be discussed in the second part of the paper. (author)