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Trompe-l'œil, which can also be spelled without the
hyphen in English, (French for 'trick the eye', is an art
technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to
create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in
three dimensions, instead of actually being a two-dimensional
painting.
Although the phrase has its origin in the Baroque
period, when it refers to perspectival illusionism, use of
trompe-l'œil dates back much further. It was (and is) often
employed in murals.
Instances from Greek and Roman times are known, for instance in Pompeii.
A typical trompe-l'œil mural might depict a window, door, or
hallway, intended to suggest a larger room.
A version of an oft-told ancient
Greek story concerns a contest between two renowned
painters. Zeuxis
(born around 464 BC) produced a still life painting so
convincing, that birds flew down from the sky to peck at the
painted grapes. He then asked his rival, Parrhasius,
to pull back a pair of very tattered curtains in order to judge
the painting behind them. Parrhasius won the contest, as his
painting was of the curtains themselves.
With the superior understanding of perspective
drawing achieved in the Renaissance,
Italian painters of the late Quattrocento
such as Andrea
Mantegna (1431 - 1506) and Melozzo
da Forlì (1438 - 1494), began painting illusionistic
ceiling paintings, generally in fresco,
that employed perspective and techniques such as foreshortening
in order to give the impression of greater space to the viewer
below. This type of trompe l'œil illusionism as specifically
applied to ceiling paintings is known as di
sotto in sù, meaning from below, upward in Italian. The
elements above the viewer are rendered as if viewed from true
vanishing point perspective. Well-known examples are the Camera
degli Sposi in Mantua
and Antonio
da Correggio's (1489 –1534) Assumption of the Virgin in
the Duomo of Parma.
Similarly, Vittorio
Carpaccio (1460 – 1525) and Jacopo
de' Barbari (c.1440–before 1516) added small trompe-l'œil
features to their paintings, playfully exploring the boundary
between image and reality. For example, a fly
might appear to be sitting on the painting's frame, or a curtain
might appear to partly conceal the painting, a piece of paper
might appear to be attached to a board, or a person might appear
to be climbing out of the painting altogether—all in reference
to the
contest of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. In a 1964 seminar, the
psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques
Lacan (1901 –1981) observed that the myth of the two
painters reveals an interesting aspect of human cognition. While
animals are attracted to superficial appearances, humans are
enticed by the idea of that which is hidden.
Perspective theories in the 17th-century allowed a more
fully integrated approach to architectural illusion, which when
used by painters to "open up" the space of a wall or
ceiling is known as quadratura.
Examples include Pietro
da Cortona's Allegory of Divine Providence in the Palazzo
Barberini and Andrea
Pozzo's Apotheosis of St Ignatius on the ceiling of the
Roman church of Sant'Ignazio.
The mannerist
and Baroque
style interiors of Jesuit
churches in the 16th and 17th-century often included such
trompe-l'œil ceiling paintings, which optically 'open' the
ceiling or dome to the heavens with a depiction of Jesus',
Mary's,
or a saint's ascension or assumption. An example of a perfect
architectural trompe-l'œil is the illusionistic dome in the
Jesuit church, Vienna, by Andrea
Pozzo , which is only slightly curved but gives the
impression of true architecture.
A fanciful form of architectural Trompe-l'œil is known
as quodlibet which features realistically rendered paintings of
such items as paper-knives, playing-cards, ribbons and scissors,
apparently accidentally left lying around, painted on walls.
Trompe-l'œil can also be found painted on tables and
other items of furniture, on which, for example, a deck of
playing cards might appear to be sitting on the table. A
particularly impressive example can be seen at Chatsworth House
in Derbyshire, where one of the internal doors appears to have a
violin and bow suspended from it, in a trompe l'œil painted
around 1723 by Jan van der Vaart. The American 19th century
still-life painter William
Harnett specialized in trompe-l'œil. In the 20th century,
from the 1960s on, the American Richard
Haas and many others painted large trompe-l'œil murals on
the sides of city buildings, and from beginning of the 1980s
when German Artist Rainer
Maria Latzke began to combine classical fresco art with
contemporary content trompe-l'œil became increasingly popular
for interior murals.
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