Anamorphosis is a picture stretched on purpose so that it looks right from only one spot. From the front it reads as a smear.
Seen from far to one side, or reflected in a curved mirror, the distorted shape snaps into a clear image: a face, a skull, a saint.
The best-known example lies on the floor of The Ambassadors, a large double portrait that the German painter Hans Holbein the Younger painted in London in 1533. At the men's feet, a long, pale shape slants across the patterned floor. From where a visitor normally stands, it looks like a gray bone or a stain, and nobody can say what it is.
The answer depends on where the visitor stands. Someone who walks close to the right side of the canvas and looks back across it at a sharp angle, almost along the surface of the paint, sees the long shape pull together into a skull. That change gives anamorphosis its name, built on a Greek word meaning "to transform."
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
The two men above the skull are Frenchmen. Jean de Dinteville, on the left, was the ambassador of King Francis I of France to Henry VIII of England, and Holbein, who had settled in London, painted him there.
Facing him stands his close friend Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur, a town in southern France. Between them, a shelf holds globes, books and scientific instruments.
The trick on the floor, though, was not Holbein's invention. It grew out of linear perspective, the geometric rules worked out in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that let a flat picture show depth. Once painters had mastered those rules, they could also bend them on purpose.
Leonardo's stretched eye
The bending began on paper, not on canvas. Some thirty years before The Ambassadors, Leonardo da Vinci tried it in one of his notebooks, on the drawing of a single human eye.
What You'll Discover
Why a skull lies at the ambassadors' feet.
How painters stretched a drawing square by square.
The portrait of a boy prince seen sideways.
What a curved mirror does to a smear.
Where a saint hides in a Roman corridor.