Anamorphosis

Anamorphosis that can only be seen through the cylindrically curved mirror

Hans Holbein the Younger , The Ambassadors , 1533. The skull in the lower center becomes visible when you look at it from a very flat angle from right to left below ...

... or using a spoon

Anamorphic portrait of Charles I of England . The position for setting up the cylindrical mirror is marked by the skull.

An anamorphosis ( ancient Greek ἀναμόρφωσις anamorphosis , Greek αναμόρφωση 'the transformation' , from ancient Greek μορφή morph , German 'shape, form' ) has been used since 1657 to describe images that can only be recognized from a certain angle or by means of a special mirror or prism system are.

species

Anamorphoses, which need a mirror to decipher the image content, are called catoptric anamorphoses.

Anamorphoses that can be recognized without a mirror are usually length anamorphoses in which the image is stretched very much in length. If you look very flat at such a length anamorphosis, it appears rectified. Traffic signs on road surfaces, such as numbers, arrows and zebra crossings, are applied anamorphically, as a car driver is looking at the road from a flat angle.

In cartography , map anamorphosis is often used to describe representations with inconsistent scales as anamorphosis or anamorphosis.

history

This possibility of encrypting messages has been known since the Middle Ages and has achieved true mastery in many churches in Italy. To decipher you have to know the right perspective. Forbidden motives, such as B. erotic scenes shown. Numerous artists painted anamorphoses for scientific reasons; some of them were also mathematicians.

One of the best-known examples of anamorphosis in the fine arts is Hans Holbein the Younger's painting , The Ambassadors, from 1533, which hangs in the National Gallery in London . Other artists and graphic artists who chose (partly hidden) anamorphic representations include Cornelis Anthonisz , Gaspard Antoine de Bois-Clair , Lodovico Buti , Hans Heinrich Glaser , Adrian P. Goddijn , Athanasius Kircher , Jean-François Niceron , Erhard , Caspar Schott , Guillem Scrotes and Johann Stommel .

Anamorphosis has been used in illusionistic ceiling painting since the Renaissance to compensate for the vaults and irregularities of the ceiling from the perspective of an assumed viewer (looking from below). Arthur Samuel Mole (1889–1983), an American photographer, used the technique of anamorphosis to create huge images that he assembled from up to 30,000 people. They could only be seen undistorted from a high observation tower.

In video art, anamorphosis is often used to outsmart the human eye. The American rock band OK Go shot their video for The Writing's On the Wall completely with and about this stylistic device as a one shot.

In more recent contemporary painting, René Luckhardt has dealt with anamorphosis with his cycle “Anamorphic Portraits”.

literature

Fred Leeman, Joost Elffers, Mike Schuyt: Anamorphoses. A game with perception, appearances and reality. DuMont, Cologne 1982, ISBN 3-7701-0854-X
Thomas Eser: Crooked pictures. Zimmer's anamorphosis and other eye games from the collections of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg 1998, ISBN 3-926982-55-1
Georg Füsslin, Ewald Hentze: Anamorphoses. Secret worlds of images. Füsslin, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-9803451-6-5
Kyung-Ho Cha, Markus Rautzenberg (ed.): The distorted look. Anamorphoses in art, literature and philosophy. Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn 2008, ISBN 978-3-7705-4611-4

Web links

Commons : Anamorphosis - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

↑ According to Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphoses (1984), Caspar Schott was the first to use the term; in the first volume, part 1, book 3 De Magia anamorphotica of his Magia universalis naturae et artis , Würzburg, 1657.
↑ A further example, which also includes the walls in the street drawing, is the visual guidance system in the Eureka Tower car park in Melbourne ( Memento from December 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
↑ The Tiroler Tageszeitung reported under the title of world upside down under the palm trees on the exhibition at Galerie Bernd Kugler Innsbruck, 17 December 2017 [1]

[1] According to Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphoses (1984), Caspar Schott was the first to use the term; in the first volume, part 1, book 3 De Magia anamorphotica of his Magia universalis naturae et artis , Würzburg, 1657.

[2] A further example, which also includes the walls in the street drawing, is the visual guidance system in the Eureka Tower car park in Melbourne ( Memento from December 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive )

[3] The Tiroler Tageszeitung reported under the title of world upside down under the palm trees on the exhibition at Galerie Bernd Kugler Innsbruck, 17 December 2017 [1]