If you’ve visited this site before, you may remember a wonderful Trompe-L’Oeil painting of a boy escaping through a window, by a Spanish artist called Del Caso. You can see that painting this winter, if you have a chance to be in Florence, Italy. It will be in an exhibition called Art and Illusion, Masterpieces […]
In the era of Trump it’s got harder to tell reality from illusion, but here’s a ceiling from about 300 hundred years ago that shows a real magician in the illusion line at work. The inside of the dome – everything inside the gold circle – looks as if it extends upwards, but it is […]
The dome in the left hand picture is an illusion! It was painted on the ceiling of the Jesuit church in Vienna by Andrea Pozzo a bit over three hundred years ago. Seen from just the viewpoint of the photo on the left, it’s one of the classics of trompe l’oeil painting. The right hand […]
We’ve posted on illusions in architecture before, but they’ve been historic ones, in Roman mosaic floors and in so-called trompe-l’oeil ceilings. Here’s a brilliant recent example, (2015) from Jamie Fobert Architects, for London’s luxury shopping Burlington Arcade. The arcade was opened in 1819, when modern shopping was just beginning to be a boom activity. For […]
