An ancient painter lost a contest by trying to pull back painted curtains
Zeuxis painted grapes so lifelike that birds swooped down to peck them. Then his rival Parrhasius invited him to draw aside a pair of ragged curtains, and Zeuxis reached for fabric that was only paint. That old Greek tale sits at the root of trompe-l'œil, the art of fooling the eye.
The French name means deceive the eye, and it only dates from 1800, when Louis-Léopold Boilly used it as the title of a picture at the Paris Salon. The trick itself is far older. Murals at Pompeii already opened walls onto imaginary windows, doorways and corridors to make rooms feel bigger.
Renaissance painters turned it into a science of perspective. Andrea Mantegna and Melozzo da Forlì foreshortened figures on ceilings so that people standing beneath seemed to gaze up into open space, an approach Italians call di sotto in sù. The Camera degli Sposi in Mantua and Correggio's Assumption in Parma Cathedral are celebrated cases. Seventeenth-century theory pushed further into quadratura, whole painted architectures, and Andrea Pozzo gave a Jesuit church in Vienna a dome that is barely curved yet reads as a true cupola. Smaller jokes nodded to Zeuxis too: Carpaccio and Jacopo de' Barbari painted flies apparently resting on frames.
Dutch and Flemish still-life artists made a speciality of it. Cornelis Gysbrechts produced a freestanding cutout of an easel holding a picture, and Samuel van Hoogstraten wrote a 1678 treatise on art as lifelike imitation. At Chatsworth House, a door appears to have a violin and bow hanging from it, painted around 1723 by Jan van der Vaart. Stage designers borrowed the method as forced perspective: Vincenzo Scamozzi's seven streets at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, from 1585, seem to recede far beyond the stage.
Modern uses keep multiplying. Richard Haas has covered city walls with illusionary murals since the 1960s, including a Chicago tribute to its skyscraper school. Donald O'Connor sprinted up a painted hallway in Singin' in the Rain in 1952, and Wile E. Coyote kept crashing into tunnels he had painted on rock. Elsa Schiaparelli's Bowknot Sweater is sometimes called the first fashion trompe-l'œil, and chalk artists such as Julian Beever create pavement scenes that last only until the rain.
Source: Trompe-l'œil
