People often see hidden faces in things. Depending on the circumstances, this is referred to as pareidolia, the perception or recognition of a specific pattern or form in something essentially different. It is thus also a kind of optical illusion. When an artist notices that two different things have a similar appearance, and draws or paints a picture making this similarity evident, they make images with double meanings. Many of these images are hidden faces or hidden skulls.
These illusionistic pictures present the viewer with a mental choice of two interpretations: head or landscape, head or objects, head or architecture, etc. Both of them are valid, but the viewer sees only one of them, and very often they cannot see both interpretations simultaneously.
Chance image: An alarm clock where a "sad face" could be perceived.
Sometimes buildings provide shapes which can be interpreted as "faces". (In Mon Oncle the filmmaker Jaques Tati gave a house "rolling eyes" by letting two actors move behind the windows.)
There are everyday examples of hidden faces, they are "chance images" including faces in the clouds, figures of the Rorschach Test and the Man in the Moon. Leonardo da Vinci wrote about them in his notebook: "If you look at walls that are stained or made of different kinds of stones you can think you see in them certain picturesque views of mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, broad valleys, and hills of different shapes. You can also find in them battles and rapidly moving figures, strange faces and costumes, as well as an infinite number of things." Francois and Jean Robert collected and published a lot of photos of "chance faces".
The Mannerist master at the 16th-century imperial Habsburg courts of Vienna and Prague, Giuseppe Arcimboldo of Milan was probably the best known artist for creating extraordinary hidden faces. He arranged flowers, vegetables, fruits, shells, scallops and other animals, books and different things on the canvas in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a portrait. His series of The Four Seasons seems to be the first use of this approach and technique. Arcimboldo's composite heads were celebrated and imitated by his contemporaries but they were relatively forgotten until participants in the twentieth-century art movements rediscovered them, bringing them to the attention of art historians. He is considered as forerunner of Dada and Surrealism.[citation needed]
Salvador Dalí was fascinated by the technique of Arcimboldo and his paranoia-critical method was influenced by the Mannerist painter. For Dalí the Arcimboldo effect was a form of self concealment as well as this exhibitionist painter seemed, all throughout his life of constant posturing, to hide his real self behind the gaudy externals of his behaviour. Larvatus prodeo, "I wear a mask," he could have said with Descartes and he used this quotation from the French philosopher for the epigraph of his novel Hidden Faces.[citation needed] Probably his most famous "hidden face" is Voltaire in his oil painting: "Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire". Other Surrealist painters rediscovered the technique of hidden faces in the first part of 20th century:
Istvan Orosz tries to combine the technique of anamorphosis with the hidden faces. Anamorphosis is used for those works of art that were made as distorted and unrecognizable through clever geometrical constructions. But when viewed from a certain point, or through a reflecting object placed upon it, the hidden image appears in its true shape, that is, it goes through retransformation. Orosz made experiments with anamorphoses not only in resurrecting the old technique but to improve and develop it. Instead of having a meaningless distorted image, his intent is to bring sense to the basic anamorphic picture, giving it meaning in itself with its second reading being revealed by viewing it from a different viewpoint such as looking at it through a special mirror.[1] The ambiguous layers coming up by this approach make use of the connection or contrast of the two images within the same picture being independent from each other.[2]
There are many other contemporary works using hidden faces:
The pioneering study on the matter is an academic dissertation, unpublished to this day: Anita Joplin, The Anthropomorphic Landscape: A Study in 16th Century Imagery (unpublished thesis, Reed College), 1974.
On anthropomorphic landscapes
Fernand Hallyn, "Le paysage anthropomorphe", Yves Giraud (ed.), Le Paysage à la Renaissance, Fribourg: Editions universitaires de Fribourg, 1988, pp.43 ss.
Michel Weemans & Jean-Hubert Martin (eds.), Le paysage anthropomorphe à la Renaissance (international conference proceedings, 2009), Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, (awatiting publication).
Michel Weemans, "Herri met de Bles’s sleeping peddler: an exegetical and anthropomorphic landscape", The Art Bulletin, Vol. 88, Iss. 3, pp.459–481.
Andreas Hauser, «Andrea Mantegnas ‘Wolkenreiter’: Manifestationen von kunstloser Natur oder Ursprung von vexierbildhafter Kunst?», Gerhart von Graevenitz, Stefan Rieger, Felix Thürlemann (eds.), Die Unvermeidlichkeit der Bilder, Tübingen, 2001, pp. 147-172.
Omar Calabrese (2006): Artists' Self-Portraits, ISBN978-0-7892-0894-1 (The book has a chapter on artists who hide self-portraits in their pictures: e.g. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Munch, Dalí, Albrecht Dürer, Velàzquez, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Ingres, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gainsborough, Matisse, James Ensor, Egon Schiele, Frida Kahlo, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Rockwell, and Roy Lichtenstein.)
On crypto-images more broadly
Walter Melion, Bret Rothstein, Michel Weemans (eds.), The Anthropomorphic Lens: Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism and Analogy in Early Modern Thought and Visual Arts, Leiden: Brill, 2015.
Jean-Hubert Martin (ed.), Une image peut en cacher une autre - Arcimboldo, Dalí, Raetz (exhibition catalogue), Paris: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 2009. ISBN978-2-7118-5586-5
Jean-Hubert Martin, Stephan Andreae (eds.), Das endlose Rätsel. Dalí und die Magier der Mehrdeutigkeit (exhibition catalogue, Düsseldorf, Museum Kunst Palast), Ostfildern-Ruit, 2003.
Dario Gamboni, Potential images: ambiguity and indeterminacy in modern art, London: Reaktion, 2002.
Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, L'art de la tache: Introduction à la Nouvelle methode d'Alexander Cozens, Paris: Éditions du Limon, 1990.
Jean-Didier Urbain, "La crypto-image ou le palimpseste iconique", Eidos, 5, 1991, p.1-16, et
On chance images
Horst W. Janson, "The ‘Image made by Chance’ in Renaissance Thought", Millard Meiss (ed.), De Artibus opuscula XL. Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, New York, 1961, I, pp.254– 266, II, pp.87–88.
Horst Woldemar: "Chance Images", in: Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, vol. 1, New York 1973, pp. 340-353.
Mannerism is a style in European art that emerged in the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520, spreading by about 1530 and lasting until about the end of the 16th century in Italy, when the Baroque style largely replaced it. Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century.
Trompe-l'œil is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. Trompe l'œil, which is most often associated with painting, tricks the viewer into perceiving painted objects or spaces as real. Forced perspective is a related illusion in architecture.
The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table is a small Surrealist oil painting by Salvador Dalí. Its full title is The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table . It makes reference to The Art of Painting by Johannes Vermeer, a famous seventeenth-century work in which a painter, thought to be a self-portrait of Vermeer, is depicted with his back to the viewer, in distinctive costume. It is one of a number of paintings expressive of Dalí's enormous admiration for Vermeer.
The Ambassadors is a 1533 painting by Hans Holbein the Younger.
Anamorphosis is a distorted projection that requires the viewer to occupy a specific vantage point, use special devices, or both to view a recognizable image. It is used in painting, photography, sculpture and installation, toys, and film special effects. The word is derived from the Greek prefix ana-, meaning "back" or "again", and the word morphe, meaning "shape" or "form". Extreme anamorphosis has been used by artists to disguise caricatures, erotic and scatological scenes, and other furtive images from a casual spectator, while revealing an undistorted image to the knowledgeable viewer.
Phantograms, also known as Phantaglyphs, Op-Ups, free-standing anaglyphs, levitated images, and book anaglyphs, are a form of optical illusion. Phantograms use perspectival anamorphosis to produce a 2D image that is distorted in a particular way so as to appear, to a viewer at a particular vantage point, three-dimensional, standing above or recessed into a flat surface. The illusion of depth and perspective is heightened by stereoscopy techniques; a combination of two images, most typically but not necessarily an anaglyph. With common (red–cyan) 3D glasses, the viewer's vision is segregated so that each eye sees a different image.
István Orosz is a Hungarian painter, printmaker, graphic designer and animated film director. He is known for his mathematically inspired works, impossible objects, optical illusions, double-meaning images and anamorphoses. The geometric art of István Orosz, with forced perspectives and optical illusions, has been compared to works by M. C. Escher.
L.H.O.O.Q. is a work of art by Marcel Duchamp. First conceived in 1919, the work is one of what Duchamp referred to as readymades, or more specifically a rectified ready-made. The readymade involves taking mundane, often utilitarian objects not generally considered to be art and transforming them, by adding to them, changing them, or simply renaming and reorienting them and placing them in an appropriate setting. In L.H.O.O.Q. the found object is a cheap postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's early 16th-century painting Mona Lisa onto which Duchamp drew a moustache and beard in pencil and appended the title.
Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. It is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology. Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to abstract concepts such as nations, emotions, and natural forces, such as seasons and weather. Both have ancient roots as storytelling and artistic devices, and most cultures have traditional fables with anthropomorphized animals as characters. People have also routinely attributed human emotions and behavioral traits to wild as well as domesticated animals.
Jean-François Niceron was a French mathematician, Minim friar, and painter of anamorphic art, on which he wrote the ground-breaking book La Perspective Curieuse.
The Ecumenical Council is a surrealist painting by Spanish artist Salvador Dalí completed in 1960. It is one of his masterpieces, taking two years to complete and very large at 299.7 by 254 centimetres. The painting is a complex assemblage of art historical references and religious scenes emphasizing Catholic symbolism.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, also spelled Arcimboldi, was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books.
The Four Elements is a series of four oil paintings by the Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo which were created in 1566, during the Renaissance, for Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor. The paintings depict human faces in profile made up from different animals or objects. Air is represented by birds, Fire by burning wood and cannons, Earth by land animals and Water by marine creatures. The series attempts to express the creation of harmony from chaos by the careful arrangement of the wild animals to form portraits whilst also praising Maximilian by suggesting that he is a ruler who controls even the four primal elements.
The Temptation of St. Anthony is a painting by Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. Painted in 1946, it is a precursor to the body of Dalí's work commonly known as the "classical period" or the "Dalí Renaissance".
Vertumnus is an oil painting produced by the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo in 1591 that consists of multiple fruits, vegetables and flowers that come together to create a portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Although Arcimboldo's colleagues commented that Vertumnus was scherzo, or humorous, there were intentional political meanings behind the piece, particularly regarding the choice of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. Arcimboldo's choice to include these items was also an intentional reference to the Roman god, Vertumnus.
Tabula scalata are pictures with two images divided into strips on different sides of a corrugated carrier. Each image can be viewed correctly from a certain angle. Most tabula scalata have the images in vertical lines so the picture seems to change from one image to another while walking past it. The top image on versions with horizontal strips could be seen via a mirror placed above the picture.
Jeanette Zwingenberger is a Paris-based independent art curator and art historical scholar. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and a UNESCO member of the Advisory Committee on Works of Art (ACWA) and teaches at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University. Originally a scholar of Renaissance Art, Dr. Zwingenberger generally specializes in contemporary art and is author of more than thirty books and exhibition catalogues, on it. She writes on art for Kunstmagazin, art press, L’œil and L'Observatoire de l'art contemporain. Zwingenberger has organized art exhibitions and interdisciplinary art programs on the topics of visual perception, hidden images, visual language, environments and cannibalism.
The Seasons or The Four Seasons is a set of four paintings produced in 1563, 1572 and 1573 by the Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo. He offered the set to Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor in 1569, accompanying The Four Elements. Each shows a profile portrait made up of fruit, vegetables and plants relating to the relevant season. The set was accompanied by a poem by Giovanni Battista Fonteo (1546–1580) explaining their allegorical meaning.
Proto-Surrealism is a term used for Surrealism avant-la-lettre. It is the study of various forms of art, literature, and other mediums that correspond to, reference, or share similarities to the 20th-century art movement known as Surrealism. This definition is considered a controversial topic, with many debating the suitability of the term surrealism to describe these bodies of work and instead opting to use the term Fantastique or Fantastic Art.
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