![]() ![]() Its width is similarly exaggerated to about four times its height (excluding the frame), but in contrast to the elongated eye, the painting’s largest figures cannot be recognized at first glance. 6 Like Leonardo’s drawing of a disembodied eye, this painting enlists viewers as active agents of an optical transformation. 4)-appear not merely misshapen when seen from front and center but wholly unrecognizable. 3), and his wife, Amalia Landgravine von Leuchtenberg (ca. 2), whose pair of portrait subjects-Wilhelm Werner, Count von Zimmern (1485-1575), a university-educated magistrate of the Imperial Chamber Court ( Reichskammergericht) at Speyer ( fig. This essay concerns an anonymous, early-sixteenth-century panel painting from southern Germany: the Zimmern Anamorphosis, of circa 1535 ( fig. (artwork in the public domain photo © Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy/De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images) 1478–1518 Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana fol. 1 Leonardo da Vinci Anamorphosis: Study of the Eye on the left, Juvenile Face, in Codex Atlanticus ca. 4 Starting with Jurgis Baltruŝaitis in the 1950s, art historians have applied the seventeenth-century neologism anamorphosis (a gerund comprising the Greek words for “again” plus “form”) to images that are designed to be seen from more than one vantage point, as well as to the techniques for making them. A century later, a character in Shakespeare’s Richard II used the expression “eyed awry” to describe how to overcome the initial “confusion” presented by anamorphic images: 2 pictures that the playwright and his contemporaries called “perspectives.” 3 Seen from eccentric positions, at oblique angles, anamorphic images appear to reshape themselves, although it is the viewer who enacts their optical transformation. 1 From a conventional central vantage point, these figures appear misshapen, but they seem naturalistically proportioned when regarded from off to the side with one eye closed. 1), the earliest known examples of the artistic phenomenon we call anamorphic distortion. like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon / show nothing but confusion,Īround the year 1500, Leonardo da Vinci made two small, disproportionately wide sketches of an eye and a child’s head ( fig.
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