Anamorphic Art & Plato

When we visited Rome, Professor Atkins really wanted the class to experience one of her favorite pieces.  In fact, this piece is the largest piece of anamorphic art created to this day/in its time.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to see the piece as it is conveniently placed within a building that is currently unopened to the public.  This was a large disappointment as anamorphic art, in my opinion, was a large part of the Renaissance.  Anamorphic art is believed to have made its debut circa 1485 with Leonardo da Vinci’s Leonardo’s Eye, smack dab in the middle of our Renaissance.  It continued with Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors painted in 1533. This famous painting of two men with an odd floating shape in front of them, from a down and rightward angle looking up is revealed to be a skull.

 

The influences of anamorphic art surfaced throughout our trip to Rome.  For example: the church of Sant’Ignazio.

Although it was created by Andrea Pozzo sometime in the early 1680′s (post-Renaissance) the ceiling is absolutely spectacular.  The ceiling is mostly flat however, the painting makes it seem like the ceiling is extending further and further into the heavens with these bodies arduously struggling to ascend.  This ceiling is a fantastic example of the types of ceiling frescoes that we saw throughout all of Rome.  Almost every ceiling was adorned with decorative frescoes and a good deal of them gave the allusion of shape where it did not exist.  This type of ceiling anamorphosis can also be found in the Sistine Chapel, on the ceilings of the Vatican Museum and the Borghese.

Anamorphoses have continued to influence art.  Current anamorphic artist Istvan Orosz, born in 1951 with examples of mirror anamorphoses:

And Julian Beever, a current anamorphic sidewalk chalk artist:

All of this anamorphic art reminded me of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” from The Republic.  In this theoretical situation people were placed in a cave for their entire lives and fettered so that the only things they could see were the shadows cast in front of them and nothing of the real world.  Because puppeteers behind them gave the shadows voices or sound effects, the people of the cave associated those sounds with the shadows and believed the shadows were reality.  Then, one of the cave people were dragged out of the cave into the real world and made to see and understand the true nature of things.  Just as a person stares at Holbein’s The Ambassadors perplexed as to what that mysterious shape could be, possibly assuming a belief about the shape – it’s a rug – only to find out, no it is an anamorphic image and when you look from the appropriate perspective you can see its true nature as a skull.  Talk about coming out of the cave!  And, just as the man who understands that the shadows of the cave are not the truest form, the man who knows that the shape is a skull can never see the rug again.  This made me think: Just as the cave people rejected their old friend after he had been enlightened (Ha, that’s punny.  Enlightened – he saw the sun… It’s funny, just laugh.), can it be the same with anamorphic art?  Can groups of artists disagree about the anamorphphosis, refusing to see the hidden image?