Here’s a rotating head illusion for Christmas. I’ve been giving talks about Christmas imagery, and sometimes use old fashioned transparencies. Recently I glanced at my slide of Santa upside down, and there was the face of the great Norwegian playwrite of a century ago, Henrik Ibsen. It’s an illusion in the tradition of the one I posted earlier, about two characters called Mr. and Mrs. Turner. (That post includes an animation). There are lots of other pictures of rotating heads by nineteenth century illusion artists.
It wouldn’t be easy to find two more different artefacts than these. On the left is a silk velvet embroidery made in Italy about five hundred and fifty years ago. On the right is a shield from Koave in Papua New Guinea, made in the last hundred years. Yet they both use exactly the same graphic device, a figure/ground effect.
Here’s another figure/ground effect. A saint becomes a balustrade! Almost any vertical figure whose profile is not too wiggly can be used for this illusion. Below is a different version of it. It’s a little more puzzling, because both saint and balusters, when seen as figure at the ends of the picture, have the same starry sky as background. That’s done by making sure that when saint or balusters are seen as background near the ends of the row, they blur into the same starry night sky.
This stag may look OK at first glance (well, you know, sort of…), but hang on, has he got three antlers, as at the top of the picture, or only two, as down by his ears? Following on from the last post, it’s another example of what happens when apertures or gaps in the visual scene – like the segment of starry night in the last post – become objects. But with the stag it’s even weirder, because the middle antler, for example, starts out at the top OK, but by the time it gets down to the stag’s head, it’s become background. Want to know more? Read on!
Here’s a historic artwork I reckon I’ve much improved. On the left you see it as has been for the last five hundred years or so, a Spanish (I think) wood carving, of a martyred saint, now in the Petit Palais museum in Paris. On the right I’ve turned it into an ambiguous image, in which it’s not clear which head belongs to the body, and which has been chopped off and is being held up for inspection – I think you’ll agree a far more poignant image. It’s an illusion in the style of the Mask/Skull illusion posted earlier.
Here’s a version of my adaptation with an evening sky:
I wrote in an earlier post about how effective decorative motifs can be if they are ambiguous visually or in some other way a bit of a challenge for perception. Why that should be is a mystery, but here’s another of my favourite examples, decoration from a pot made in Corinth, Greece, about 595 BCE.
The pot’s in the British Museum and I guess it’s about 70 cms high. Here’s (nearly) the whole thing.
What’s unusual about this decoration is the way the rosettes and other little decorative motifs in between the animals have expanded to fill almost all the space. In earlier Corinthian decoration, they were much smaller, just little motifs floating in the pale space round the animals. Over two or three decades, painters made them fill more and more of the space, until they left only an outline round each animal. I reckon that shows up better in a version of the first picture which I’ve played around with, and reversed so that the pale outlines are dark.
What’s perceptually puzzling about that, I reckon, is that the brain can’t quite decide whether, in this reversed version, these are animals with strong, dark outlines on a pale background, or pale animals silhouetted on a dark background. If you like doing your own paintings, it’s a brilliant effect to play with, and works just as well with modern motifs, human figures, cars, aeroplanes, umbrellas, you name it.
Is this a picture of a mask looking at a skull it’s holding up for inspection, or vice versa?
I got the idea from a print by Picasso, Young man with mask of a bull, faun and profile of a woman. There’s a copy in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, and you can see it by calling up,
I reckon some images look beautiful because they bamboozle the brain processes we normally depend on to make sense of the world. I don’t know why that can help make patterns and pictures look beautiful. Nor do I think perceptual puzzlement is the essence of art, or anything like that. But just from a practical point of view, if you are an artist (or a composer, poet or architect), a motif that’s puzzling can seem to offer a stepping off point for aesthetic effects.
Here are two beautiful examples from architectural decoration, both just about 500 years old. The first is the dome of the Mausoleum of Sultan Qaitbay in Cairo.
What’s puzzling about this is that a single line segment can be part of the edge of an object, such as a star, and at the same time part of a line that meanders over the whole surface. Edges don’t behave like that in everyday vision. Here’s the dome with added lines, left below, to show what I mean. Look at the segment that is labeled with both blue and yellow lines.
Then note that you can do just the same with the lines that outline the octagons on the ceiling in the picture to the right – every edge is also part of a fan of lines. That ceiling is in Christchurch Cathedral in Oxford, and we even know who designed it – William Orchard, the Master Mason. Now we’d call him the architect. Here’s a picture showing a bit more of the ceiling.
I don’t think it’s just the puzzling features that make these patterns so beautiful. Interlace patterns like these look like small segments of patterns that go on for ever, and in both Christianity and Islam were a metaphor for perfection and heaven. And that’s how I reckon artists turn perceptually puzzling effects into something more than amusing images – they choose motifs that are also metaphors for some deeper meaning.
Heads that present one character one way up and another when rotated have been favorite illusions for over a century. Here are two heads from a cartoon story I devised about a boy who gets stuck in a weird hotel. The receptionist and chef, (Mr. and Mrs. Turner …. ) seem OK at first, but then transform into two sinister old men when their heads rotate.
For an animation of Mr. and Mrs. Turner see below:
