Temporal Images: The Anamorphic Game and the Nature of Picture

Anamorphoses are odd and intriguing images. They are fascinating: their pictorial content, albeit foreseen, is at first sight concealed and spectators are invited to solve a riddle, looking for the right vantage point on the depicted scene. And they are odd: anamorphoses are borderline images because they live on the threshold between the capacity spectators have to glimpse what it is concealed by the painting and the failure of their efforts, ending up in the perception of an intricacy of lines and unfamiliar shapes. Like pictures in trompe-l’oeil, which play on the divide between image and reality, anamorphoses are jokes between sign and design, between what the spectator grasps at first sight—some irregular shapes floating on the background—and what she succeeds in perceiving after a while by moving back and forth in front of the canvas. Anamorphoses belong therefore to the family of tricks: the point of their perception is the moment in which spectators seize what is hidden under the intricacy of the lines they are looking at and enjoy working out the puzzle by which they had been fooled.