I like that there’s a 2000 year old style of artwork which is just historically trolling people with pictures.
“Jan, prithee fetch my giant comb from the random selection of objects I have strapp’d to the wall over there”
“Of course, Samuel! But… what? I cannot grasp the giant comb, it is flat… these objects are all flat”
“Lol”
Wut
The style of work (which had existed much longer, but was named “Trompe-l’œil” a few hundred years ago, French for “Deceive the eye”) is a style of realistic painting intended to trick the viewer into thinking it’s a real object/room/space.
If you owned one of these in your house, you could troll everyone who visited by asking them to go through the fake door, open the fake curtain, pick up the fake object on the fake table etc, whilst you sat giggling in the corner waiting for them to realise it was merely a painting.
The fact that the room may only be dimly lit by candle or gas/paraffin lamp would help with your deception.
Cool. This was new to me. Thanks for taking the time to type that up. For those curious about the “trolling your guests” angle, I’m guessing it’s based on this… (ala Wikipedia)
A typical trompe l’œil mural might depict a window, door, or hallway, intended to suggest a larger room.
A version of an oft-told ancient Greek story concerns a contest between two renowned painters. Zeuxis (born around 464 BC) produced a still life painting so convincing that birds flew down to peck at the painted grapes. A rival, Parrhasius, asked Zeuxis to judge one of his paintings that was behind a pair of tattered curtains in his study. Parrhasius asked Zeuxis to pull back the curtains, but when Zeuxis tried, he could not, as the curtains were included in Parrhasius’s painting—making Parrhasius the winner.[4]
This has now forever changed my opinion on paintings of still objects.
Most of them are still just “a picture of a thing”, so you’re probably fine to keep the original opinion in most cases :)
