Trompe-l'oeil is a style of painting that copies an object so exactly that, for a moment, the viewer takes the picture for the thing itself: a letter tucked into a rack, a fly on a frame, a door left ajar.
The trick works best on flat things shown at their real size, such as a letter pinned to a board, set close to the surface of the picture.
The name is French and means "deceive the eye." Painters were already playing the trick in ancient Greece, but the label was only coined in Paris in 1800.
One picture from 1874 holds the whole idea. In Escaping Criticism, by the Spanish painter Pere Borrell del Caso, a boy grips the lower edge of a heavy picture frame and leans out of it, as if about to climb into the room. That frame is not the real border of the canvas. Like the boy, it exists only in paint.
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The oldest story about this kind of painting was told by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, an encyclopedia of everything known in his day. It describes a contest between two Greek painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasios.
Zeuxis went first, with grapes so convincing that birds flew down to peck at them. His rival then brought a work that seemed to be hidden behind a curtain. Proud of the birds' verdict, Zeuxis asked him to draw back the cloth and show the picture underneath. There was nothing underneath. The curtain was the painting.
Zeuxis gave in at once, admitting that he had deceived birds while Parrhasios had deceived a fellow artist.
Pliny adds a second story that goes less well for the loser. Later on, Zeuxis painted a boy carrying grapes, and once again the birds came down to the fruit. This time he was annoyed.
Had he made the boy as convincing as the grapes, he reasoned, the birds would have been too frightened to land. The fruit had tricked them, but the figure had not scared them off. From its first telling, then, the art of deception came with a doubt attached: one perfect detail could make the rest look weak.
A Roman bedroom near Vesuvius
Pliny's grapes are lost, like almost all Greek painting. The walls of one Roman bedroom have survived, though, and they still play the same game with everyone who walks in.
What You'll Discover
A fly painted on a master's drawing.
Why the back of a canvas fools best.
The painted boys George Washington bowed to.
The Salon picture that named the genre.
A New York wall with fifty-five false windows.