Customer Reviews

Anamorphic Art

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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.