Smoke and Mirrors

U of G physicist trains gimlet eye on story of ‘long-lost' anamorphic image

BY ANDREW VOWLES

It's a tale of a deliberately ambiguous painting that hides a story, but even the tale gets distorted in the telling. So says retired physics professor Jim Hunt, who will visit England this summer to share what he's learned from his most recent application of long-neglected math and physics wizardry to a once-fashionable art form.

In London, he will speak about a painting of St. Anthony of Padua by an anonymous 16th-century artist, a work that Hunt calls a classic, if clumsily rendered, example of anamorphic art.

An anamorphic image is one whose deformed appearance becomes normal only when viewed from an unconventional angle or with the aid of a curved mirror. Think of the elongated images painted on bicycle lanes that appear normal from the viewpoint of an approaching cyclist or motorist.

Hunt has made the study of anamorphs into something of a retirement project connected to his longtime interests in light and optics. He has examined historical examples of this art form, created his own samples, worked out the underlying math and physics, and even completed part of an ambitious translation of an early French text on the topic.

His most recent project began when a European researcher asked him to investigate an anonymous painting of St. Anthony of Padua. The researcher sent him a digital version of the image scanned from a recent newspaper story about the painting and invited him to analyze the science behind the art.

Never mind the deformed image: Hunt was equally intrigued by apparent distortions in the British newspaper account itself, which hung on a lost-and-found tale that he says turned out to be apocryphal.

According to the newspaper article, the painting — a 33- by 10-inch oil on wood — had been shown in 1936 at New York's Museum of Modern Art along with Salvador Dali's Bather. The article described how the St. Anthony of Padua image had apparently vanished after that show and was “found” by chance only last year in an art collection belonging to the late sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.

Smoke and mirrors, says Hunt. Anyone looking for the painting's whereabouts could have found the Lipchitz reference in an authoritative text called Anamorphic Art. And contrary to a suggestion in the newspaper article that the painting was done in the 18th century, he says the book by French art historian Jurgis Baltrusaitis pegs its creation to 1535.

This spring, using some mathematical sleight-of-hand, Hunt worked out how the painting's particular trompe-l'eoil effect was achieved. What he describes as “a bad Hieronymus Bosch” — a bridge, a stretch of water, disconnected items — morphed into two figures and a collection of symbols associated with St. Anthony of Padua.

He incorporated his image into a homemade viewing device, using an extensible wooden arm with a pinhole. Squint through the hole from the extreme left side and you see the 12th-century Franciscan priest kneeling on a prayer rug, his neck clasped by the Christ Child. Other items in the picture include a cross, a book that is probably a Bible and a lily.

Apart from the image itself, something else soon became clear to Hunt. “This is not a great painting.” His calculations revealed that the unknown artist broke a cardinal rule by using more than one perspective horizon.

Still a mystery to the physicist is why the artist would have chosen to paint the anamorphic picture at all.

For centuries, artists have used anamorphic paintings not just to play with visual perspective but also to manipulate meaning. Some images were intended to reveal their message only to the initiated, such as a painting of Charles I that might have been owned by closet Royalists during the Cromwell era.

In Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, an odd-looking smear in the foreground resolves into a human skull when viewed from the side — the artist's intentionally ironic comment on human vanity.

Hunt says the form was particularly popular with Renaissance-era painters interested in mysticism. In a scenario that he concedes contains echoes of Da Vinci Code-style conspiracy theories, he says a long-ago order of friars was believed to follow obscure rituals using anamorphic devices to display images of saints and other holy figures.

He learned that snippet from a book on anamorphic images published in the mid-1600s by Jean Francois Niceron. It's taken Hunt five years and a well-thumbed French- English dictionary to translate about two-thirds of the volume, called La Perspective Curieuse, into English.

“I'm learning 17th-century French,” he says. “It's a foolhardy project.”

He guesses that the book's intended readers were mathematicians and artists upon whom Niceron wished to impress the importance of paying attention to mathematical rules. (In an amusing parallel with that perspective-deficient artist, Hunt says Niceron was at best a mediocre mathematician: the physicist had to clean up some of the math in his transformation algorithms.)

Since retiring, Hunt has re-derived the equations used to make these images, working with departmental colleague Prof. Bernie Nickel and graduate student Christian Gigault. A paper they co-wrote six years ago pointed out that the mathematical basis for this art form had been neglected for centuries.

Hunt will speak about his work this summer at the Bridges Conference, an annual event that brings together mathematicians, artists, musicians and scientists. While in London, he plans to visit the gallery where the St. Anthony image has been displayed since last month. “It would be a shame to do all the work and not see the real thing,” he says.

Samples of Hunt's recent work with mirrors and anamorphic images are currently exhibited in the foyer of the MacNaughton Building.