Catoptrics and Anamorphosis (original) (raw)

2019, Vision, Perspectiva and Shifting Modalities of Representation

Is what we see the ‘truth’? Can anamorphic imagery resolve the dichotomy between science and faith? In the 1640s Emmanuel Maignon, a French monk in residence at Trinitá dei Monti, the Minim Monastery in Rome, created an anamorphic wall painting of St John of Patmos in an upstairs gallery. This was about a hundred years after the controversial work of astronomers Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, and when Galileo Galilei, placed in house arrest by the Pope for presenting a heliocentric solar system that was not only heretical as it contradicted Holy Scripture but philosophically ‘foolish and absurd’, was nearing the end of his life. Studies of optics did not originate in the renaissance, as there were many advances between the ninth and fourteenth centuries when Euclidean theories were tested and advanced. In particular the Arab scholar, Alhazan, (985-1040) wrote about how optics influenced our understanding of the nature of reflection and refraction of light. In the 17th century, three men who were friends with one another, a Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), Minim friars Jean-Francois Niceron, (1613-1646) and Emanuel Maignan, (1601-1676) also devised proposals for catoptric and anamorphic projection, using developments optics and perspective to question divine light and perception in a merging of science and faith asking if we can rely on what we see, or if there is a hidden, perhaps heretical or even divine message hidden in the imagery. This paper examines some examples of anamorphosis, at Trinitá dei Monti painted by Maignon, at St Ignazio the Jesuit church in Rome painted by Andrea Pozzo (1691-1694) and of course Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors painted in 1533 and hanging in the National Gallery. It begins by questioning the philosophical meaning and concludes with a technical examination of how catoptrics and anamorphosis work, through a student workshop where we attempted to create an anamorphic image in the studio.