Fun-Fair Illusions

By ROBERT HUGHES

The show of visual games and illusions that opened last week at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts may not be the most profound art exhibition in recent years, but it is among the most exotic and diverting. It is called "Anamorphoses." The word comes from the Greek roots for "shape" and "again," and it applies to images or patterns that look illegible, mere scrawls and smears, until reconstituted--either by looking at them side-on or by glimpsing their reflections in a specially placed cylindrical, conic or pyramidal mirror. The organizers, two young Dutch artist-scholars named Michael Schuyt and Joost Elffers, have come up with examples of almost every imaginable kind of anamorphic illusion. The exhibition is crowded with visual oddities of four centuries, from puzzle landscapes that, seen from the side, turn into religious icons or scatological jokes to a full-scale false-perspective room, more startling than any funfair illusion, by Contemporary Artist Jan Beutener. Where museums would not part with originals, working copies have been made.

The most famous anamorphic image in art is the smear of paint that tilts upward, like a dun-colored flying saucer, from the bottom of Hans Holbein's 1533 double portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, The Ambassadors. When squinted at edge-on, from the right-hand side of the frame, the smear turns into a skull. The illusion is startling: the rest of the painting disappears and the death's-head floats eerily in a greenish-brown blur. What Holbein meant by it is still a matter of debate among historians. Is it a comment on the vanitas of earthly possessions and power, the transience of those grave young faces and minutely delineated objects? A comment on the relativity of painting to the real world? A heraldic device? A grim play between the German words hohle Bein (hollow bone) and the artist's own name? Or, given the elaborate nature of 16th century wit, is it all of these and more? Few early anamorphic paintings that survive are as complete in their illusion as this one. One of them is a portrait of Edward VI, painted in 1546 --under Holbein's influence--by an English artist, William Scrots. Seen from a peephole in the edge of the frame, it turns into a medallion, with the same apparitional quality as the skull.

Skewed Interior. By the 17th century, anamorphosis and other tricks of perspective were common currency.

Peep shows were much sought after: the master of this taxing form was the Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraeten, who around 1655 constructed a perspectyfkas, or perspective cabinet, a whole miniature Dutch interior to be viewed through eyeholes. So complete is the illusion that one cannot guess, without taking the lid off the box, that these stable objects-- the chair, the dog, the tile floor -- that seem to have the clearness and density of the real world are painted flat, a jumble of skewed angles involuntarily assembled by one's own eye.

"I will pass over," Van Hoogstraeten wrote, "the manner in which, through reflected lines, malformed shapes may be restored to their correct aspect in re flecting globes, angled mirrors and cylinders; for these are truly artifices rath er than the essential arts." Indeed, if artists of marked talent ever experimented with what is called cone, cylinder or pyramid anamorphosis, their work has vanished. The survivals show a coach painter's or an illustrator's skill:

there are no great aesthetic moments, but the sense of curiosity and fun is unflagging. Such anamorphoses are "restored" by placing a mirror-surfaced solid, usually a cylinder, at the focus of the design. Then the pattern, which ERDAM flows in eccentric loops and weird, squishy deformations, comes to gether in reflection.

Out of the Jumble. The trick of setting up the distortions was in principle fairly simple, and any competent draftsman could mas ter it. But again, the illusions were dramatic: a portrait, a Crucifixion (for Catholics who might want to keep their devotions concealed from Calvinist servants or spies), a ship at sea or a landscape materializes where only a grotesque jumble had been before. It was also good for pornography, of which a few pieces, mild by today's standards, are on view in Boston: pink 18th century bodies entwined, in somewhat froggy postures, on couches and loggias.

Anamorphoses remained popular throughout the 18th century; engraved, printed and hand-colored, with cheaply available mirrors, they belonged in every cabinet of parlor games. But nothing was added to the technique, and by the mid-19th century a newer visual marvel, the daguerreo type, had arrived to stale its novelty.

Throughout most of the 20th century the whole issue of illusion and perspective has seemed so far from the center of art's own concerns that anamorphosis has been forgotten. Until its recent rediscovery by perceptual psychologists, it con stituted the smallest of art's historical footnotes. So one can be glad that this show -- which will travel to other muse ums in Brooklyn, Cleveland, Chicago, Washington and Atlanta-- has resurrected it. Trivial and fragmentary as they may seem, these puzzling ambigu ities can only enrich our sense of what goes on at the boundaries of visual per ception, where the two worlds of seeing and knowing intersect.

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