Trompe l'oeil
Trompe l'oeil is the artist being clever (to understate the case).
Pliny the Elder wrote a famous story about two painters who had lived in 5th century BCE, Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Zeuxis painted a mural of some grapevines which were so realistic that birds tried to land on the branches and pick the grapes. Not to be outdone, Parrhasius asked Zeuxis to inspect one of his paintings which was veiled behind an old pair of curtains. When Zeuxis tried to draw the curtains aside they were, of course, painted.
From the French, trompe l'oeil means 'I trick the eye': the artist persuades us to see something which isn't there.
But wait a minute. That's what artists do most of the time. How is trompe l'oeil different?
We normally speak of trompe l'oeil when there is a deliberate attempt to mislead the viewer: to trick them.
I imagine that most people will be familiar with optical illusions - those quirky drawings and diagrams which look straightforward until you examine them closely.
They fool us through clever use of perspective. Whenever we look at a painting or drawing, we forget how we have spent our whole lives learning to 'read' perspective. Two otherwise parallel lines converging towards the top of the page 'means' they are disappearing into the distance. We learned that long ago, and it has become so natural to us that we forget it is learnt. Artists and others take advantage of this to fool us.
A candlestick
or two profiles?
MC Escher
Unrivalled draughtsman of the optical illusion.
But artists have been employing this technique for centuries in serious pieces of work:
Annunciation Diptych
Jan van Eyck
1435
Van Eyck uses painted shadows and reflections to create the illusion of free-standing statuary.
Jesuit Church, Vienna
Andrea Pozzo
1703
Pozzo has created a fictive dome in this otherwise vaulted ceiling.
The limitation of this technique is made obvious though: the trick only works if you stand in one particular spot.
Trompe l'Oeil
Edward Collier
1699
Much more commonplace were these kind of pieces, designed for domestic settings.
Escaping Criticism
Pere Borrell del Caso
1874
Of course, a fundamental trompe l'oeil is the frame of a painting: a completely artificial boundary to any composition.
Some artists have played with this idea.
And then there is contemporary street art which anyone with access to the internet will know well ...
I think it would be a mistake to let ourselves get too po-faced about these. They're a lot of fun and very clever. And if we want to find a serious point, they remind us that all figurative art is illusion to one degree or another.