Anamorphic Art [Hardcover]

Jurgis Baltrusaitis (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 182 pages
• Publisher: Chadwyck-Healy (June 1977)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0859640299
• ISBN-13: 978-0859640299
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,555,425 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An indispensible text from the master of marginalia, March 28, 1999

By 

Andrew Mamo ([e-mail] (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Anamorphic Art (Hardcover)

Baltrusaitis' work in the field of marginal art forms is slowly taking on new significance in our digital age. His work here, like that in the more poetic "Aberrations", is a history of the various technologies that exploited the discoveries of perspective and optics from the Renaissance onward. The result is an enlightening journey through the underlying metaphysics of perception and representation that formed the foundation of the perspectival image. It reveals that practitioners of this art possessed a playful understanding of the technology and its capacity for illusion. This of course is at odds with the kind of stodgey, politicized interpretations of perspective that have been contrived in more recent art historical analyses (compare for example, John Berger's cringingly misinformed and pretentious analysis of Holbein's "The Ambassadors" in his book "Ways of Seeing", with the sensitive and rational approach of Baltrusaitis when analysing the same work.) Baltrusaitis is unique amongst art critics - a man who genuinely loves images and finds in them the wonders of human intelligence.