Trompe l’oeil painting has been around since ancient Greek and Roman times, but there’s a lot more to it than just photorealistic images
recounts the story of two legendary painters, and Parrhasius, who were trying to decide which of them was the more accomplished artist. They brought two covered canvases to show each other. First Zeuxis revealed his – a bunch of grapes so lusciously lifelike that birds swooped down to peck at the canvas. Confident of victory, Zeuxis leaned over to pull the cover off Parrhasius’s offering, only to find that the covering itself was the painting. Having been fooled by his rival’s handiwork, Zeuxis admitted defeat.
Examples of this “trick of the eye” art, or trompe l’oeil as it commonly known, date back to Graeco-Roman times, but it wasn’t until the Renaissance, when painters mastered the art of perspective drawing, that the genre flourished. Examples include the image of a little boy climbing out of a painting’s frame, called Escaping Criticism, and the work above, known as the Cabinet of Curiosities, thought to have been painted by the Flemish artist Domenico Remps in the 1690s.
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“Trompe l’oeil didn’t flourish until the Renaissance, when painters mastered the art of perspective”
This painting works because the objects are life-size and depicted in hyper-realistic detail, and also because Remps laid a set of decoys that hoodwink our visual system into perceiving depth, says , a neuropsychologist at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK. Misleading cues include the way the wood grain shrinks the further into the cabinet you look, and the way shadows fall on the sill and the paper drawing.
The most important visual cue, however, is the strange shape of the canvas – it follows the outline of the open cabinet. “We’re all very familiar with cabinets with rectangular doors, so when we see this, we have either got to see it as an oddly-shaped thing on a wall or as a familiar object that is sticking out,” Heard says.
All of these factors combine to fool the brain into perceiving a scene that may well be physically impossible. Heard and the late , professor emeritus of neuropsychology at the University of Bristol, once tried to place a bottle of wine, a wine glass and a lump of cheese in a 3D frame to mimic a trompe l’oeil of the same image. “We could never find the right objects because the dimensions in the painting are distorted,” says Heard.
Read more: Six ways that artists hack your brain
