Trompe l’Oeil Painting: Vision, Perception, Deception I
Reflecting on the relationship between “reality” and “irreality,” and on the illusionism that distinguishes trompe l’oeil painting, the French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) wrote in 1977: trompe-l’oeil is such a highly ritualized form precisely because it is not derived from painting but from metaphysics; as ritual, certain features become utterly characteristic: the vertical field, the absence of a horizon and of any kind of horizontality (utterly different from the still life), a certain oblique light that is unreal (that light and none other), the absence of depth, a certain type of object (it would be possible to establish a rigorous list of them), a certain type of material, and of course the “realist” hallucination that gave it its name[…]As a strict formal “genre,” as an extremely conventional and metaphysical exercise, as anagram and anamorphosis, it is opposed to painting as the anagram is opposed to literature. The most strikingly distinctive characteristic is the exclusive presence of banal objects.1 There are many possible readings of the trompe l’oeil, which the Italian intellectual Pietro Accolti (1579–1642) aptly described nearly four centuries ago as “a deception of the eyes.” 2 It gained acceptance as a style of European painting from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century, at the same time as the still life, attracting talented artists who produced highly original works, as many continue to do to the present day. The problems posed by the ambiguous relationship between reality and the representation of reality that characterize the trompe l’oeil—the striving for verisimilitude, the nature of the duplicate, the
illusion of perspective and concrete materiality—have also interested many scholars over the centuries and have been analyzed from the perspectives of art history, psychology, perception, semiotics, and the communication sciences. The French locution trompe-l’oeil (“to deceive the eye”) came into use in Europe during the nineteenth century. It refers to a style of painting that—through the virtuoso expedients of mimesis, perspective, and skillful use of light and shade—induces in the viewer the illusion that what are being observed are real, threedimensional objects when in reality they are actually images painted on flat surfaces. The origins of the genre may be traced back to the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. Examples of naturalistic painting from the prehistoric period have been found on the walls of caves near Lascaux in southwestern France and Altamira in Cantabria, Spain. Ancient Egyptians often decorated the walls of their tombs with realistic images of everyday objects, but it was during the classical Greek period that artists excelled in the creation of illusionistic effects. In his encyclopedic work Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder (23–79 ce) recounts an anecdote that testifies to the early spread of this art form. It is the story of a contest that was held between two well-known artists—Zeuxis and Parrhasius, who lived sometime during the fifth and the fourth centuries bce (but none of whose works, unfortunately, have come down to us)—in order to determine who was the more accomplished painter of visual illusions. It is worth citing the passage from Pliny and the story that Battersby and Renard may well have known.
Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Libreria, detail, 1725–30, oil on canvas, Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica, Bologna.
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