![]() ![]() The naturalistic techniques developed by the Greco-Romans were all but lost during the Dark Ages. Notably, artists of this time period also produced shockingly modern still lifes, a genre that would become a standard-bearer of optical experiments for thousands of years. Dwellers could imagine themselves not in a four-walled room, but an infinite world, thanks to the possibilities of painting. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, reconstructed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Artists decorated the villas with exterior scenes of lavish gardens (as in the Villa of Livia) or fantastical cityscapes (see the cubiculum from the Villa of P. The perfectly preserved frescoes excavated at Pompeii and Herculaneum (which constitute some of the only surviving examples of ancient painting) show an early interest in perspective and anatomy-as well as art’s illusory possibilities. In the same text, Pliny provides one of the earliest accounts of Greco-Roman painting, namely the frescoes painted in private villas. Zeuxis may have fooled the birds, but Parrhasius fooled the man. But then Zeuxis asked Parrhasius to draw back the curtain covering his own entry-only to discover that the “curtain” itself was a painted illusion. It may have seemed like the battle was over. When Zeuxis unveiled his still-life composition, the depicted grapes appeared so realistic that birds flew down to peck at them. ![]() According to the myth, the artists, who lived in the 4th century B.C.E., challenged each other to a contest to determine who was the greater painter. 77–79), the Roman author Pliny the Elder relays a now-infamous tale about a competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, the two leading artists in ancient Greece. Although the term “trompe l’oeil” was only coined in the 19th century, artists from ancient Greece to the present day have used their skills to play an often-humorous game of deceit. The latter is more than ultra-realistic its subject matter endeavors to pop out of the frame. It can seem difficult to define a boundary between virtuosic verisimilitude and trompe l’oeil, the French term for painterly optical illusions (literally translating to “deceive the eye”). Over the centuries, evolving technological and theoretical advances-from the discovery of perspective to the invention of photography-have altered the character and intentions of illusionism in art, though the tension between fiction and reality has remained throughout. This has led artists throughout history to employ realist techniques in order to explore the nature of art and perception-and to deceive their viewers. One of the most traditional ways to appraise a work of art is to ask just how faithfully it reproduces the natural world. ![]()
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