Trompe-l'oeil is a kind of painting made to be mistaken, for a moment, for the real thing: a letter tucked into a rack, a fly resting on a frame, a door left open onto the room. A realistic painting asks to be admired as a picture. A trompe-l'oeil tries to make the viewer forget that there is a picture at all.
The name is French and means "deceive the eye." It is much younger than the trick itself, since it was only coined in Paris in 1800. Pere Borrell del Caso's Escaping Criticism, painted in 1874, shows the idea in a single image. A boy grips the edge of a picture frame and leans out of it, as if he were about to climb into the room, and the frame he holds is painted too.
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The oldest story about this kind of painting comes from Pliny the Elder, the Roman author of the Natural History. Two Greek painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasios, held a contest.
Zeuxis painted grapes so convincingly that birds flew down to peck at them. Parrhasios then showed his own work, which seemed to be hidden behind a curtain, and Zeuxis, proud of the birds' verdict, asked him to pull the curtain aside. The curtain was the painting.
Zeuxis conceded. He had fooled birds, he said, while Parrhasios had fooled a painter. Pliny adds a second story that goes less well for him. Zeuxis later painted a boy carrying grapes, and the birds came down to the grapes once again. He was annoyed rather than proud, because if he had painted the boy as well as the fruit, the birds would have been afraid to come near.
So from the very first telling, the trick came with a doubt. Fooling the eye was a feat, but it was not quite the same thing as painting life well.
What You'll Discover
A Roman bedroom with views that are not there.
Why the back of a canvas fools best.
The painted boys George Washington bowed to.
A New York wall with fifty-five false windows.