These twelve optical illusion paintings run from Pere Borrell del Caso's boy climbing out of his frame, painted in 1874, to the hidden skull in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, painted in 1533.
Each of them needs the person in front of it to do something: stand in the right place, keep a certain distance, or believe for a moment that paint is something else.
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How These Were Chosen
An optical illusion in painting makes the eye report something that is not there. A flat ceiling opens into the sky, a heap of fruit becomes a face, a painted bird passes for a real one.
The French term trompe l'oeil, "deceive the eye," names the most literal kind, a picture made to be mistaken for the objects it shows.
A painted ceiling may need one marked place on the floor, a painted box an eye pressed to its hole. Step away, and the picture goes back to being paint.
Every work here was also made with a brush, on canvas, panel, plaster or wood, so prints and drawings stay out. The entries count down to the best known illusion of all, Holbein's skull.
12. Pere Borrell del Caso, Escaping Criticism (1874)
A boy is climbing out of a picture. Both his hands and his right foot grip the molding of the frame, and his chest has already cleared it. Pere Borrell del Caso, a painter from Catalonia, made this canvas, Escaping Criticism, in 1874.
The whole effect rests on that frame, which is painted too. Borrell laid it in first, before the boy and the rest of the composition.
Older painters had already set their sitters inside painted frames, but those sitters stayed put and posed. Borrell gives his boy one to get out of.
Where anyone stands makes no difference here. What the canvas needs is a belief, that the molding is a real frame standing out from the wall. Grant that, and the boy leans out into the room. Seen as paint, the molding goes flat, and he sinks back into the same surface as the edge he grips.
That belief split the people who saw the picture first. It was shown in Barcelona in 1874 under another title, A Thing That Cannot Be, and the public took to it.
Apel·les Mestres, a local writer then about twenty years old, refused to play along. He dismissed it as a trivial and childish joke.
At a Glance
Artist: Pere Borrell del Caso (1835 to 1910), Spanish
Painted: 1874
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 75.7 × 61 cm (29.8 × 24 in)
Where to see it: Banco de España collection, Madrid
11. Jacopo de' Barbari, Dead Partridge with Iron Gauntlets and Crossbow Arrows (1504)
Against a wall of wooden boards hangs a dead gray partridge, with two iron gauntlets and a few crossbow bolts beside it. Jacopo de' Barbari painted the panel in 1504, and it is among the earliest known trompe l'oeils of its kind, a still life meant to be taken for the objects themselves.
Barbari knew that skill alone would not fool anyone. For the bird to pass for real, it needed the right wall.