trompe-l'œil

trompe-l'œil. Term (French: ‘deceives the eye’) applied to a painting (or a detail of one) that is intended to deceive the spectator (if only briefly) into thinking that it is a real object rather than a two-dimensional representation of it. Such virtuoso displays of skill often have a humorous intent, and anecdotes of almost miraculous feats of trompe-l'œil are typical of periods in which naturalism has been cultivated, such as the classical age in Greece (see Parrhasius) and the Italian Renaissance. Vasari, for example, records that the young Giotto tricked his master Cimabue by painting on the nose of a figure on which he was engaged ‘a fly so lifelike that when Cimabue returned to carry on with his work he tried several times to brush it off with his hand, under the impression that it was real, before he realized his mistake’. Petrus Christus' Portrait of a Carthusian (c.1446, Met. Mus., New York) is an example of a painting with such a trompe-l'œil fly, here on a painted ledge at the bottom of the picture, rather than on the sitter's nose. Sometimes the term trompe-l'œil is used loosely to refer to any type of pictorial illusionism (for example quadratura), but such usage deprives a useful term of its precision.