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Trompe l'oeil, meaning "fool or deceive the eye," is a French term for paintings that imitate natural appearances so convincingly that viewers momentarily mistake the object depicted for the real thing. A heightened form of illusionism, the art of trompe l'oeil dates back to antiquity and flourished from the Renaissance onward. The discovery of perspective in fifteenth-century Italy and advancements in the science of optics in the seventeenth-century Netherlands enabled artists to render objects and spaces with eye-fooling exactitude. The moment of deception, however, is brief. Uncertainty over what is real and what is illusion is soon replaced by amusement at having been tricked and admiration for the artists' ingenuity and skill. Both witty and serious, trompe l'oeil is a game artists play with spectators to raise questions about the nature of art and perception.
Deceptions and Illusions explores the art of trompe l'oeil through more than one hundred European and American paintings, and a few works in other media, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. A prologue reveals the literary and visual sources of trompe l'oeil, with works of art inspired by ancient and early Renaissance prototypes. Organized thematically, Deceptions and Illusions then pre- sents the principal subjects of trompe l'oeil artists, beginning with images of letters, prints, dollar bills, and other flat objects that appear to rest on the picture surface. The exhibition progresses to increasingly three-dimensional illusions in which objects appear to project or recede from the picture plane, blurring the boundary between real and fictitious space. Within each section, paintings from different periods show the widespread persistence of trompe l'oeil themes over the centuries. An epilogue investigates the legacy of the art of trompe l'oeil to twentieth-century artists.
The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art.
It is generously sponsored by Mary Jo and Robert L. Kirk and supported
by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
prologue
Trompe l'Oeil in Antiquity
The esteemed painters of classical and hellenistic Greece--Zeuxis, Parrhasios, Apelles, Protogenes, Sosos--are but names today, their works known only from glowing accounts by ancient writers and, occasionally, Roman copies. Pliny the Elder described Sosos' lost mosaic of an "unswept floor" from the second century b.c., probably created for a dining room in a house in the city of Pergamum. The photographic reconstruction of the mosaic exhibited here is based on fragments of a second-century a.d. copy preserved in the Vatican Museums. With its border "strewn" with fishbones, shells, nuts, and other remains of a meal, the Vatican mosaic is a rare survivor of trompe l'oeil from antiquity.
In the first century b.c., a Roman artist named Possis was said to have created images of "fruit and grapes in such a way that nobody could tell them by sight from the real things." Possis' works have not survived, but illusionistic still lifes buried by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 a.d. have been excavated at Pompeii. Although the Pompeiian painting and mosaic shown here may not fool modern eyes, they successfully imitate natural appearances. Created in a Roman province centuries after the renowned masterpieces of ancient Greece, such works offer a glimpse of the illusionism achieved in lost works of antiquity.
prologue
The Grapes of Zeuxis
Although the great eye-deceiving paintings of antiquity are lost, surviving descriptions of them have inspired artists across the centuries to try to rival or even surpass ancient painters. Among the most famous was Zeuxis, a Greek of the late fifth–early fourth century b.c., who was said to have painted grapes so realistically that birds tried to eat them. Memory of this trompe l'oeil painting was still alive more than four hundred years later, when the Roman historian Pliny the Elder described it in his Natural History. With the revival of antique literature during the Renaissance, Pliny's text recirculated and was quoted by artists and writers, including Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) in Italy, and later, Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678) in the Netherlands and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) in America. The story of Zeuxis' painting set a standard for the perfect imitation of nature and made grapes a subject par excellence for trompe l'oeil artists aiming to demonstrate their skill.
prologue
The Curtain of Parrhasios
Not to be outdone in the competition with Zeuxis, the ancient Greek artist Parrhasios created a trompe l'oeil painting of a curtain and showed the work to his rival. According to Pliny, Zeuxis asked Parrhasios to draw the curtain aside to reveal the painting he assumed lay behind it. When Zeuxis realized that he had been fooled, he declared Parrhasios the winner of the contest, for the curtain had fooled a connoisseur--an artist--while Zeuxis' grapes had fooled only birds. As the story of the competition between these two artists circulated in Europe after the Renaissance, Parrhasios' name became synonymous with excellence: in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, the painter Gerrit Dou (no. 8) was so renowned for his skill that critics dubbed him the "Dutch Parrhasios." At the time, curtains were commonly hung in front of paintings to protect them from dust and soot. Artists who emulated Parrhasios' curtain consequently also played on viewers' expectations of seeing an actual curtain suspended from a rod attached to the frame. In a humorous variation on this theme, the American artist Raphaelle Peale used a trompe l'oeil cloth to "hide" his painting of a female nude from prudish nineteenth-century eyes (no. 12).
prologue
Xenia and Trophies of the Hunt
Hanging dead game on a wall or door to begin the process that tenderizes meat has been commonplace since antiquity. The earliest surviving images of this practice reflect an ancient tradition of hospitality. In the first century b.c., the writer Vitruvius reported that hosts in ancient Greece provisioned their guest quarters with xenia, gifts of poultry, game, fruit, and vegetables for visitors to prepare to their liking. Painted imitations of such gifts were also called xenia, which were depicted on the walls of Roman villas to evoke wealth and generosity. Most xenia, including the painting of the bowl of fruit shown earlier in the exhibition, were probably intended to deceive, although their faded and cracked condition now dispels any illusion. The painting of three pigeons (no. 17), for example, includes a favorite trompe l'oeil motif: the nail that casts a shadow in imitation of an actual nail driven into the wall.
The theme of dead game hanging from a nail became a staple of trompe l'oeil painting during and after the Renaissance. Artists depicted hunting trophies, sometimes with horns or other paraphernalia of the hunt, suspended against a plastered wall or weathered door. These painted backgrounds may have imitated the walls against which the pictures were hung. Little is known about the original display of trompe l'oeil paintings, but some possibly hung in hunting lodges or places where viewers expected to find dead game, thereby enhancing the illusion of seeing actual trophies of the hunt.
prologue
Giotto's Flies and the Observation of Nature
Since the Renaissance, the Italian artist Giotto (c. 1266–1337) has been credited with reviving the illusionistic painting of antiquity through his use of light, shadow, and perspective to imitate natural appearances. According to the Florentine writer Filarete, Giotto surreptitiously painted flies on a figure in such a convincing manner that his master Cimabue tried to brush them away. The painting does not survive, and may never have existed. This anecdote may simply have been a rhetorical metaphor for artistic excellence, modelled on the ancient stories of Zeuxis' grapes and Parrhasios' curtain. The story of Giotto's flies, already in circulation when told by Filarete in the 1460s, was repeated by the early art historians Giorgio Vasari in 1550 and Karl van Mander in 1604, and alluded to by numerous artists in their paintings. The oil paintings shown here all include trompe l'oeil flies that appear to have landed on the picture surface or rest on its frame.
Trompe l'oeil flies were part of a larger phenomenon: the careful observation of the natural world that developed in the late middle ages and early Renaissance. The new interest in nature was grounded in the religious belief that "There is no creature so small that it does not represent the goodness of God," as Thomas à Kempis wrote in the early fifteenth century. The highly illusionistic flies and other insects that appear in northern manuscripts and illustrated books reflect this appreciation for all of God's creations. To depict them faithfully, artists began to look at nature with a scientific eye, recording flora and fauna with an exactitude that would be essential to the development of trompe l'oeil painting.
Temptation for the Hand
The hand touched a flat surface; but the eye, still seduced, saw relief;
to the extent that one could have asked a philosopher,
which of these two contradictory senses was a liar?
Denis Diderot, Salon of 1761
In all illusionistic paintings, painted objects look like their real counterparts; in trompe l'oeils, the painted object appears to be the thing itself. To achieve this deception, objects are rendered life size, in their natural colors, and in their entirety. If part of the object is cut off by the edge of the picture, the fiction is revealed, unless the object seems to be tucked into the frame. Most trompe l'oeils are also meticulously painted with smooth brushwork that conceals any trace of the artist's presence.
Images of letters, stamps, dollar bills, and other flat, usually paper objects, readily lend themselves to trompe l'oeil, particularly if depicted resting on a flat surface. Painted "papers" probably first appeared as secondary motifs in works such as Jan Gossaert's Portrait of a Merchant (no. 32) and then became subjects in their own right. At about the same time, artists began to "attach" a cartellino--a small piece of paper often bearing the painter's signature--to the surface of their works. Trompe l'oeil artists also imitated engravings, drawings, and other works of art on paper to demonstrate their skill and versatility. From the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, letter racks--straps or ribbons affixed to a wall to hold letters, bits of paper, or the "random" contents of a pocket--were especially popular subjects of trompe l'oeil. All of these paintings of flat objects on a flat surface tempt viewers to rely on touch rather than sight to distinguish illusion from reality.
Things on the Wall
A perfect painting is like a mirror of Nature,
in which things that are not there appear to be there,
and which deceives in an acceptable, amusing,
and praiseworthy fashion.
Samuel van Hoogstraten,
Introduction to the Elevated School of Painting, 1678
Artists increased their chances of deceiving viewers by mimicking what people expected to see. Before cabinets became inexpensive, everyday items, belongings were often stored hanging on a wall or door. Things on the wall, including weapons, musical instruments, toiletries, and other possessions, consequently developed into a favorite trompe l'oeil theme. Through the use of highlights, shading, and perspective, artists created illusions of three-dimensional objects that seem to project from the picture surface into the viewer's space.
The third-century b.c. painting of a sword from the tomb of a cavalryman in southern Italy (no. 47) is among the oldest surviving representations of an object suspended from a trompe l'oeil nail. The motif of the painted nail "casting" a shadow, faintly visible in the tomb painting, recurs in most trompe l'oeil paintings of this type. An exception is the painting of a violin (no. 50) attributed to Jan van der Vaart, in which the feigned instrument "hangs" from an actual metal knob, further blurring the distinction between fact and fiction.
Niches, Cupboards, and Cabinets
Trompe l'oeil artists often created the illusion of a spatial recess filled with objects that entice viewers to reach in and take them. The contents of these "niches" and "cabinets" include liturgical vessels, manmade and natural wonders, and items used in daily life. Unlike "things on the wall," which seem to project toward the viewer, these trompe l'oeil objects appear to occupy space that recedes behind the picture plane. In these spatially layered works, artists obscured even the location of that plane by painting panes of glass or metal hinges and locks that seem to rest on top of, rather than within, the picture surface.
Late medieval and Renaissance sculpture was often displayed in niches, giving rise to trompe l'oeil paintings that mimicked this practice. Paintings of fictive niches filled with "sculpted" figures also reflect the debate that arose in the Renaissance over the relative merits of painting and sculpture. Some claimed that painting was the higher of the two arts, as painters could imitate sculpture, but sculptors could not simulate painting. Painters argued their superiority, in part, by means of grisailles--paintings in different shades of gray such as Jacob de Wit's Allegory of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (no. 64). De Wit was the foremost practitioner of grisaille in the eighteenth century when a critic wrote, "all gaze at his figures in amazement, seeing marble that art alone has hewn."
In and Out of the Picture
First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint,
I draw a rectangle...which I regard as an open window
through which the subject to be painted is seen.
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, 1435
The Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten painted View down a Corridor (at the far end of this room) in 1662 while living in England. His life-size image of a domestic interior pushes to an extreme the Italian theorist Alberti's idea that painted views should be as convincing as those seen through a window. Van Hoogstraten's succession of doorways that gradually recede from the picture plane creates the illusion that actual space flows seamlessly into pictorial space, inviting viewers to step into a fictive world. The effect would have been especially pronounced in the candlelit room of the seventeenth-century house in London where the diarist Samuel Pepys saw and admired the work the year after it was painted.
The pictures in the next gallery also play with the idea of the painting as window. Life-size figures appear to reach out of the picture plane or pull our eye into a spatial realm that seems to lie behind it--contradicting the fact that the picture is a flat, painted surface. Figural trompe l'oeils are rela-tively rare, however, because the depiction of movement, which we expect of living people and animals, lies beyond the capability of painting. Viewed from a distance in dim light, however, some figural trompe l'oeils probably did deceive: Rembrandt reportedly created a painting of a servant that was placed at a window of his house and fooled passers-by.
The Painting as Object
The irony of trompe l'oeil is that its success depends on viewers realizing that they have been duped: it is the moment of discovery that delights spectators and inspires admiration for the artist's skill. Many trompe l'oeil painters draw attention to the artifice underlying their illusions by including images of palettes, paintbrushes, and other tools of their craft. Often, they show part of a painting curling off its stretchers to reveal the blank underside of the raw canvas. The "torn" wrappings along the edges of the fifteenth-century Virgin and Child with Angels (no. 80) or John Haberle's Torn in Transit (no. 95) also remind viewers that paintings, no matter what they depict, are physical objects.
The theme of the painting as object is taken a step further in "cut-out" pictures, whose contours are cut in the shape of the things they represent, as in Franciscus Gijsbrechts' Glass Cupboard Door (no. 63). Some nineteenth-century American artists even painted actual three-dimensional objects, as in John Haberle's Clock (no. 94) or S. S. David's Cat in a Crate (no. 93). In the twentieth century, artists who rejected trompe l'oeil, and illusionism in general, would pursue the idea of the painting as a physical object, but in very different ways.
The Object as Art
The twentieth-century artists whose works are exhibited in this gallery engage with trompe l'oeil in a variety of ways. Duane Hanson extends the traditions of trompe l'oeil with his deceptive sculptures of ordinary people. Other artists refer to trompe l'oeil motifs while producing a wholly distinct form of art. Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein's Stretcher Frame with Cross Bars III (no. 107) and Jasper Johns' Ventriloquist (no. 106), for example, directly quote trompe l'oeil sources while deliberately denying illusionistic trickery.
The artists in this room also share certain intellectual concerns with the traditions of trompe l'oeil. From movements as diverse as cubism, dadaism, and pop, they have explored the relationship between representation and reality, often incorporating real objects and elements of popular culture into their canvases, drawings, and sculptures. In his Bottle of Bass, Glass, Tobacco Packet, and Visiting Card (no. 96), Pablo Picasso glued an actual tobacco packet onto his drawing to call attention to the work of art as a physical object rather than as a transparent picture plane. Such blurring of the boundaries of art and life was further confused by Marcel Duchamp's "readymades" (common objects stripped of their functional context and elevated to the status of art), as well as by Jasper Johns' Painted Bronze (no. 105) and Andy Warhol's White Brillo Boxes (no. 104), which replicate ordinary commercial products. Whereas trompe l'oeil artists attempted to depict visual equivalents of objects, twentieth-century artists such as Daniel Spoerri (no. 110) presented everyday objects themselves as works of art. In all of these works, artists extend the subject of art beyond the image to include a self-reflective inquiry into the nature of art itself.
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