Trompe l’œil and di sotto in sù: the art of deceiving the eye

Trompe l’œil, French for “deceive the eye”, is painting so lifelike that the viewer for a moment believes it is real: a fly on the frame, a niche in the wall or a ceiling that opens onto the sky. Di sotto in sù, Italian for “from below upwards”, is a variant for ceilings and vaults, in which the figures are painted as if they were floating above the viewer and seen from below.

Facts

The grapes and the curtain

Writers of antiquity already told of paintings that deceived the eye. The Roman author Pliny the Elder recounts a contest between two Greek painters. Zeuxis painted grapes so lifelike that birds flew down and pecked at them. Parrhasius then asked him to draw aside the curtain in front of his own picture, but the curtain was painted. Zeuxis admitted defeat: he had deceived birds, but Parrhasius had deceived a painter.

The story is an anecdote, but it shows an ideal that has accompanied painting ever since. Being able to deceive the eye was proof of skill. In Roman homes, as in Pompeii, walls were painted with columns, windows and views that made small rooms seem larger. The term trompe l’œil, on the other hand, is much younger and came into use in France far later.

Perspective turns the wall into a room

The real instrument of illusion arrived with linear perspective in 15th-century Florence. When the lines in a picture meet at a vanishing point at the level of the viewer’s eyes, a flat wall can look like an opening into a room. Masaccio’s fresco the Trinity in the church of Santa Maria Novella, from the 1420s, shows a painted chapel with a coffered vault that seems to run straight into the wall.

One of the first ceilings to deceive the eye is in the ducal palace in Mantua. In the Camera degli Sposi, which Andrea Mantegna completed in 1474, he painted a round opening in the ceiling. Over a balustrade women and small angels look down at the visitor, and a pot of plants stands perilously close to the edge. The figures are foreshortened and seen from below. This is di sotto in sù in its first fully developed form.

The open ceilings of the Baroque

The Baroque made illusion one of its most important devices. In the Jesuits’ mother church Il Gesù in Rome, Giovanni Battista Gaulli, known as Baciccio, painted the ceiling fresco the Triumph of the Name of Jesus in the 1670s. The heavens seem to pour in through the ceiling, and figures in painted stucco glide out over the frame, so that the boundary between picture and building is blurred.

In the church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome is perhaps the most famous trick of all. The planned dome was never built, and the Jesuit brother Andrea Pozzo painted a dome on a flat canvas instead. A marking on the floor shows where to stand for the illusion to work; move away and the dome looks lopsided. Pozzo also painted the ceiling of the nave, where the architecture seems to continue up towards the sky. This kind of painted architecture is called quadratura.

The high point came in Germany. In the staircase hall of the Würzburg Residence, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and his sons painted one of the world’s largest ceiling frescoes in 1750–1753, with Apollo and the Four Continents. People, animals and gods crowd along the edges while a bright sky opens in the middle. Anyone climbing the stairs sees new figures constantly appear over the edge.

The fly on the frame

Trompe l’œil also exists on a small scale. The art historian Vasari relates that the young Giotto painted a fly on the nose of a figure that his teacher Cimabue was working on, and that Cimabue tried to brush it away. Whether it happened or not, nobody knows, but the fly became a recurring joke in painting, a way of showing that the painter could do more than had been commissioned.

In the 17th century Dutch and Flemish painters made whole pictures meant only to deceive the eye: letter racks with papers tucked behind ribbons, open cupboards and shelves with life-size objects. Cornelis Gijsbrechts, who worked at the Danish court, even painted the back of a framed picture, with its stretcher and a small note. It was made to stand leaning against a wall, as if someone had forgotten to turn it round.

A relative of trompe l’œil is anamorphosis, an image that is distorted and can be seen correctly only from a particular angle. The most famous example is in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, where a skull floats obliquely across the floor; read more in the guide to The Ambassadors.

Deceiving the eye at home

Illusionistic painting also found its way into ordinary houses. Decorative painters painted marble on wood, graining that imitated more expensive woods, and niches, panels and mouldings where the wall was perfectly smooth. In Gustavian rooms the walls could have painted pilasters and reliefs in grey tones, grisaille. The design section’s glossary explains the vocabulary of decorative painting.

At the Drottningholm Palace Theatre, dating from 1766, the scenery is still painted in perspective, so that a narrow stage looks like a long street or a palace. Today the tradition lives on in murals on gable walls and in street art, where paintings on the pavement look like deep holes or staircases when seen from the right point.

What to look for

Look for the spot where the illusion works best. On a ceiling it is often directly beneath the painting or at the entrance, and sometimes it is marked on the floor. Then take a few steps to the side and watch the architecture begin to lean and the figures become distorted. Look at the shadows too: in a skilful trompe l’œil they fall in the same direction as the real light from the room’s windows. Finally, look for the boundary between the painted and the real, which is often hidden behind stucco, frames or a painted balustrade.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What does di sotto in sù mean?