LE TROMPE-L'OEIL: ART FROM POMPEII TO LYON

Claire Fontaine in Lyon

Today, Claire Fontaine wants to talk about an interesting contemporanean art that has its roots in the Roman murals of Pompeii and it's present nowadays: Trompe-l'oeil.

Lyon is the best example of trompe-l'œil in France. The streets of the city are full of this particular art and all the city is an open museum. 

Claire Fontaine invites us to visit the city and enjoy it.

Trompe-l'œil, French for deceive the eye, is an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions. Forced perspective is a comparable illusion in architecture.

Though the phrase, which can also be spelled without the hyphen and ligature in English as trompe l'oeil, originates in the Baroque period, when it refers to perspectival illusionism, trompe-l'œil dates much further back. It was (and is) often employed in murals. Instances from Greek and Roman times are known, for instance in Pompeii. A typical trompe-l'œil mural might depict a window, door, or hallway, intended to suggest a larger room.

More information: Lyon Street Art

With widespread fascination with perspective drawing in the Renaissance, Italian painters of the late Quattrocento began painting illusionistic ceiling paintings, generally in fresco, that employed perspective and techniques such as foreshortening to create the impression of greater space for the viewer below. This type of trompe l'œil illusionism as specifically applied to ceiling paintings is known as di sotto in sù, meaning from below, upward in Italian.

Coyote and Road Runner

Trompe-l'œil, in the form of forced perspective, has long been used in stage-theater set design, so as to create the illusion of a much deeper space than the actual stage.

Another variant of trompe-l'œil is matte painting, a technique in film production where parts of a complicated scene are painted on glass panels that are mounted in front of the camera during shooting. This technique was common before the advent of computer-generated imagery.

Fictional trompe-l'œil appears in many Looney Tunes, such as the Road Runner cartoons, where, for example, Wile E. Coyote paints a tunnel on a rock wall, and the Road Runner then races through the fake tunnel. This is usually followed by the coyote's foolishly trying to run through the tunnel after the road runner, only to smash into the hard rock-face.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. 

The great task in life is to find reality. 

  Iris Murdoch