Anamorphosis
Anamorphosis is a distorted projection that requires the viewer to occupy a specific vantage point, use special devices, or both to view a recognizable image.
[2] Early examples of perspectival anamorphosis date to the Renaissance of the fifteenth century and largely relate to religious themes.
[3]: 131 The technique was originally developed in China during the Ming Dynasty, and the first European manual on mirror anamorphosis was published around 1630 by the mathematician Vaulezard.
[citation needed] The ancient historians Pliny and Tzetzes both record a sculpture competition between Alcamenes and Phidias to create an image of Minerva.
[3]: 7-8 Artists' experimentation with optics and perspective during the Renaissance advanced anamorphic technique, at a time when science and religious thought were equally important to its growth in Europe.
[citation needed] Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola credited Tommaso Laureti as the originator of a perspectival anamorphic technique in one of the earliest written descriptions in The Two Rules of Practical Perspective, compiled between 1530 and 1540 but not published until 1583.
[3]: 29-30,32-33 The Ambassadors (c. 1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger is known for the prominent gray diagonal slash across the bottom of the frame which, when viewed from an acute angle, resolves into the image of a human skull.
[3]: 26-28 Towards the end of the century, Charles Ozanam's Mathematical Recreations widely popularized the techniques for the creation of anamorphic images.
[3]: 117 Between 1669 and 1685, both perspective and mirror anamorphosis were introduced in China by the Jesuits to the Kangxi Emperor and monks at the Peking Mission.
[citation needed] Anamorphosis could be used to conceal images for privacy or personal safety, and many secret portraits were created of deposed royalty.
A well-known anamorphic portrait of the English King Edward VI was completed in 1546, only visible when viewed through a hole in the frame.
[3]: 28 A secret mirror anamorphosis portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie, held at the West Highland Museum, can only be recognized when a polished cylinder is placed in the correct position.
[6] The memento mori theme continued into this period, such as in an Anamorphic Painting of Adam and Eve, on display at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.
During the First World War, Arthur Mole, an American commercial photographer, used anamorphic techniques to create patriotic images from massive assembled groups of soldiers and reservists.
The Illuminating Gas (1946–66) used mild anamorphosis to force viewers into the position of peep-hole voyeurs in order to see a nude, anonymous human body.
[9] The Dalí Theatre and Museum features a three-dimensional anamorphic living-room installation; the Mae West Lips Sofa that looks like the face of the film star when seen from a certain viewpoint.
[14] Cinemascope, Panavision, Technirama, and other widescreen formats use anamorphosis to project a wider image from a narrower film frame.
[16] In 1975 a major exhibition was held focusing exclusively on anamorphic imagery: Anamorphoses: Games of Perception and Illusion in Art.
American land art pioneer Michael Heizer's Complex One (1972-1974), a massive earth and concrete structure in the Nevada desert, creates a rectangular frame for a mastaba when viewed from a specific location.
[1] Inspired by Luxor and other ancient monumental sites, it is part of the larger work City, an enormous sculpture running a mile and a half long.
Felice Varini's 2014 work Three Ellipses for Three Locks in Hasselt, Belgium is an image of three loops that are made up of segments painted on to over 100 buildings.
[21] Markus Raetz's Kopf is a large scale public installation that reveals the form of a person's head in profile when viewed from a specific vantage-point.
This involved the incorporation of land art into his work, where areas dug out of the Earth formed squares from specific perspectives.
In 2016, the street artist JR completed a massive temporary anamorphic illusion over the Louvre's pyramid, making the modern structure disappear and the original building appear as though it was still in the 17th century.
