thegetty: erikkwakkel: Deception of the eye You are being…
Deception of the eye
You are being deceived! All of these examples are of the same genre, encountered in paintings, murals and book illustrations: the “Trompe-l’oeil”, French for deceive the eye. Artists in early-modern times loved it because it allowed you to create your own reality and play tricks on the audience. They painted an object so real that you would think it was, like the painting showing a wall with a bunch of papers stuck behind a grid of red wires. A modern version is a mural showing the famous Trinity College Library in Dublin.
The three book pages are all from Joris Hoefnagel (d. 1542), who was the king of deception. Imagine seeing the pages with the bugs not on a screen, like you are now, but in a real book. You would have to suppress the urge to wipe them off, to quickly close the book. The example I like best is at the top. The flower painted on the other side of the page, which you can vaguely see, only stays on that page because its stem pricks through the surface. Here Hoefnagel is playing with reality, but also with his own representation of reality, painted on the page. It is an ironic double deception: you are deceived, and then some.
Pics: the manuscript page at the top is from Getty Museum MS 20 (hi-res image here); the bug pages are from a manuscript in the National Gallery, Washington (this is my source); the painting of the paper-filled wall is from the 17th-century painter Norbertus Gijsbrechts (hi-res image here). The wall painting is floating around on the web.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/66471876827.
