Schön's Anamorphosis

      Anamorphic art is an image that is distorted so that it looks correct only if viewed from a specific unusual angle, or using a mirror set to reflect in a particular way.  There are many variants and in some sense you could argue that any image with very sharp perspective could be considered anamorphic.  However, the real spirit of it is that the distortion should be extreme enough that the subject is unrecognizable to anyone looking at the picture in a normal way, and only when you view it in the one special way is the secret revealed.  Possibly the most famous example of anamorphic art in the renaissance is The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein, but it enjoyed quite a bit of popularity for including secret images in art, such as sexual, satirical, or dangerous political themes.

        Today I have for you three anamorphic wood block prints by Erhard Schön (Germany, c. 1491-1542), who was one of the earliest German artists to make anamorphic art.  Not surprisingly, these pictures tend to look a little weird, because it isn’t so easy to make a picture that works in both views.  Schön’s strategy tends to be adding a lot of little details in the “straight” view, while the parts of the picture that will resolve into something in the acute view are to be written off as swaths of landscape or sky in the straight view.  The top picture shows Jonah stepping out of the whale’s mouth, by the shore of a rather odd sea.  Sailors in a ship look at an avian sort of sea monster at the upper right, and a goat stands at the lower left.  However, if you look at it from a very acute angle from the lower left, you find yourself treated to the sight of a man squatting and relieving himself.  The words across the bottom say “What do you see?”  I’ve tried to distort these pictures back into shape so that you can see the hidden views, and I’ve posted those at the bottom.  (Definitely imperfect, but at least you get the idea.)

        While the first picture is naughty, the others are presumably political.  They show the heads of various rulers.  The second picture is one large head, while the third picture combines four heads into a series of panels.  The little “straight” pictures seem to show travellers of various sorts: towns, someone on a horse and another walking, a ship, and so on.  I do like the way the anamorphic man’s beard makes a sort of waterfall next to the straight ship, but for the most part it’s quite clear that this is not a normal picture!  I don’t know why these faces were turned into anamorphic pictures: is it satirical or celebratory, or did it just seem cool?

        I’ve shared a couple of other wood block prints by Erhard Schön in previous posts.  His interest in proportion and perspective is clearly on display in this funny view of Five Figures in a Building, while his satirical sensibilities are given free reign in his illustration of topsy-turvy Cockaigne.  As for the anamorphic art, I definitely enjoy it as a novelty and appreciate it as a technical tour de force, but I can’t say these pictures are actually very pleasing!  What do you think?

[Pictures: Jonah and the Whale (and more), woodcut by Erhard Schön, 1538 (Image from the British Museum);

Landscape with the head of King Ferdinand I, woodcut by Schön, c. 1532 (Image from the British Museum);

Landscapes and heads of Charles V, Ferdinand I, Clement VII, and Francis I, 1531-4 (Image from Wikimedia Commons).]