Camera degli Sposi of the Ducal Palace, Mantua, Italy (circa 1465-74) by Andrea Mantegna
To stand in the
centre of the medieval bridal chamber of the Ducal Palace in Mantua and
look up is to see the enclosed space magically widen above you.
Suddenly, a shaft of unalterably beautiful blue sky beckons through a
round aperture (or oculus) rimmed with angelic figures. Impossibly, the
barrier of the ceiling appears to have dissolved, revealing an invisible
architecture that telescopes towards heaven, thrusting your soul in the
direction of the divine. The evaporative effect is the handiwork of
Italian artist Andrea Mantegna – a genius of dramatic foreshortened
perspective and depicting figures illusionistically di sotto in sù (or
“below upwards”). Mantegna saw the flat surface of a canvas or ceiling
as an opportunity to take an observer’s eye and soul on a spiritual
journey inwards, upwards, and outwards. Believed to be the first artist
since antiquity to employ such an illusion as a dimension of interior
design, Mantegna breathed new religious life into a pagan trick.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Reversible Head With Basket of Fruit (circa 1590) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Tilt the painting
one way and it is a vibrant heap of autumnal bounty, as apples, pears,
grapes, and figs puzzle for position in an alluring, if seemingly
conventional, still life. Flip the oil-on-panel work on its head, as if
shaking loose the fruit that fills the wicker basket, and suddenly the
plumped-up portrait of a stranger assembles itself from the bright
jumble of assorted sweetness. The fibrous lashes of his chestnut eye
wink at you playfully to punctuate the visual joke. Painted by the 16th
Century Milanese Mannerist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who would later inspire
the imaginations of 20th Century Surrealist painters, Reversible Head
With Basket of Fruit tricks the eye into the restless exercise of
constructing and destroying one image in favour of the other. The result
is a work that is at once amusing and profound – one that reminds the
observer not only of the perishability of life but how our physical
existence is comprised, materially, of the fragile world around us.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
All is Vanity (1892) by Charles Allan Gilbert
Stand close to the
black-and-white drawing and it appears to be little more than a
depiction of a familiar domestic interior scene: a woman sitting at her
dressing table (or “vanity”) staring at her reflection in the mirror
opposite. Step back, and the image, deprived of its scrutinisable
details, curdles grimly into an all-encompassing skull, grinning
gothically from the shadows. Once the two overlapping images are
registered in the observer’s mind, the eye shuttles between
comprehension of one and then the other, as they wrestle for priority. A
contrivance of the illustrator Charles Allan Gilbert, the drawing
offered American magazine readers in the closing years of the 19th
Century a fresh and startling spin on the convention of the memento mori
(or ‘remember you will die’) in art history, which typically took the
form of a skull inserted somewhere in a painting to remind viewers of
their mortality. Seen from a 21st Century perspective, the inherent
preachiness of the drawing (which visually puns on the scriptural
admonishment “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of
vanities; all is vanity”) seems more than a little misogynistic in its
emphasis on feminine narcissism as the chief locus of damnable frivolity
and vice. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Drawing Hands (1948) by MC Escher
Used effectively,
an optical illusion momentarily forces the observer to rethink the
relationship between the real world that he or she inhabits and the one
depicted in the work. No one understood the penetrative power of
illusion better than the Dutch graphic artist MC Escher. In his
mesmerisingly meta Drawing Hands (1948), Escher magics from the work’s
sketchy surface a closed-circuitry of
the-hand-creating-the-hand-creating which appear to defy the limitations
of two-dimensional drawing. Obsessed with the mathematics of repeating
patterns, Escher’s work was admired by leading contemporary physicists
and philosophers. In Drawing Hands, the graphite point of the mirroring
pencil appears to be the teensy conduit through which the artist’s
existence simultaneously flows into being and dissolves into
nothingness. Caught in Escher’s endless rotation, the viewer’s eye is
left to run circles around itself. (Credit: public domain)
Galatea of the Spheres (1952) by Salvador Dalí
At first glance,
the dynamic painting appears to capture the outward propulsion, towards
the viewer, of countless colourful atoms – as if suspending in mid-blast
a nuclear explosion occurring over a watery expanse. Zoom out, and the
seemingly lawless rush of spheres cohere loosely into the coy
countenance of a woman’s bust, her head tilted gently in a manner that
recalls countless Renaissance madonnas. Spanish surrealist Salvador
Dalí’s Galatea of the Spheres was undertaken at a moment of intense
global anxiety at the prospect of nuclear armageddon and reveals Dalí’s
own accelerating preoccupation with atomic theory in the years following
the US nuclear attacks on Japan in 1945. The artist’s wife, Gala Dalí,
inspired the endlessly decomposing and composing portrait. By
embellishing Gala’s name into an echo of the mythological sea-nymph
Galatea of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dalí has constructed an elastic work
that simultaneously pulls together themes of antiquity and particle
physics and blows them to smithereens. (Credit: Archivart/Alamy Stock
Photo)
Rotorelief discs (1923-35) by Marcel Duchamp
Not every optical
illusion in the history of art is remembered with fondness. One of the
most hypnotic, if popularly dismissed, attempts to transfix the
observer’s eye was created by the pioneering French artist Marcel
Duchamp, whose famous sideways urinal Fountain (1917) caused a far
bigger splash. Comprised simply of cardboard discs onto which the artist
painted psychedelic spirals, the kinetic works spin into action when
placed, like vinyl records, onto a rotating gramophone-like gizmo.
However forcefully Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs might have pulled the viewer’s
gaze into their stupefying whirl, the Dadaist’s plan to make the discs a
commercial success by selling hundreds of sets was a dizzying disaster.
Largely forgotten by anthologists of 20th-Century art, the Rotorelief’s
ambition to create a vertiginous experience for the observer by
creating an eerily irresistible sensation of 3D depth on an abstract
surface would not be resuscitated for another generation. (Credit:
public domain)
Cataract 3 (1967) by Bridget Riley
If Géricault’s Raft
of the Medusa has the power to make observers nauseated in the face of
so much heartbreaking inhumanity, British artist Bridget Riley’s
Cataract 3 has the power to make viewers woozy just by opening their
eyes. A deceptively simple work, consisting of wave upon wave of
seasick-inducing lines, the hallucinatory canvas messes with one’s
equilibrium. A key player in the so-called Op Art (a contraction of
‘Optical Art’) movement that emerged in the 1960s, Riley was fascinated
from an early age with the optical techniques of Seurat and the
pointillists – image theories that suggest a work’s effect is finally
completed in the mind of the viewer. Where pointillists relied on the
viewer’s mind to mix a blizzard of individual dots into colour and form,
Riley seized instead upon the emotive power of minimalist geometric
shape and black-and-white forms. The result is works of disorientating
elegance that wrinkle the mind. (Credit: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images)
Sweeping it Under the Carpet (2006) by Banksy
Since the early
1990s, the British graffiti artist Banksy has sought to lift the veil on
social hypocrisies. In his famous mural Sweeping it Under the Carpet,
discovered in Chalk Farm, London, a hotel maid looks around sheepishly
as she surreptitiously discards a dustpan-full of sweepings. But rather
than lifting a carpet, she raises instead what appears to be the
membrane separating the realm of urban art (in which she exists) from
the real world that sprawls behind it. Though some recent forensic
investigations into Banksy’s real-world identity have sought to unmask
the camera-shy street artist, he has largely remained out of public
view. Hidden under a hoodie of anonymising darkness, Banksy would rather
be the wizard who manipulates our vision from behind the curtain.
(Credit: Jim Dyson/Getty Images)