Painted Paradoxes: The Trompe-L’Oeil Fly in the Renaissance Kandice Rawlings The fourteenth-century Florentine Giotto has long been ian paintings from the period of about 1450 to the 1510s, regarded as the genius who revived naturalism in European apparently meant to trick their audiences, just as Giotto had painting, liberating the art, as later commentators like Vasari deceived his teacher. would have it, from its medieval rut. Apparently Giotto was Although earlier scholars have cited Filarete’s story and also something of a practical jokester. Filarete, in his treatise its precedents in ancient literature as possible sources for on architecture written in the 1460s, recounts one of Giotto’s paintings depicting flies, no one has evaluated their connec- jokes in a discussion of the illusionistic merits of painting tion with two satirical essays, one classical and one from the versus sculpture: fifteenth century, that give exaggerated praise to the lowly We also read that Giotto, while young, creature.4 These essays, like the paintings, are self-referential painted flies that fooled his master Ci- and paradoxical: both demonstrate the creator’s great intel- mabue. He thought they were alive and lect and skill in praising a lowly, common insect, while at tried to shoo them off with a cloth. These the same time exposing the rhetorician’s and the painter’s marvelous things, derived from the knowl- ability to deceive by truthful representation—their tricks of edge of the force of color and how to locate the trade, so to speak. In painting the trompe-l’oeil fly, the it, are not seen in sculpture.1 artist showed off his wit and his manual skill and created Filarete’s wording allows us to assume that the Giotto modern, self-aware images. story, a version of an ancient literary topos in which people The use of trompe l’oeil is in some ways antithetical or animals are deceived by the work of a virtuoso artist, to our understanding of Renaissance artistic theory. Early dates back at least to the middle of the fifteenth century.2 modern painting is traditionally conceived as a “window,” The tremendous fame of Giotto and his legendary sense of as prescribed in Alberti’s treatise On Painting of 1436. In this humor recorded in numerous other tales give credence to highly influential work, Alberti describes the painting as an the speculation that such anecdotes, whether genuine or opening through which we view a scene that recedes away apocryphal, were likely circulated in literature or through from us.5 According to this model, the picture plane can be oral tradition.3 The theme of the trompe-l’oeil fly appears in thought of either as a barrier between the viewer and the over twenty extant Netherlandish, German, and north Ital- image or as a permeable, fluid boundary that sets up the im- This paper has benefited tremendously from the patient and insightful in Italian Renaissance Art (Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, help of Sarah Blake McHam; to Wendy Bellion I owe my scholarly 1978); and Edgar Wind, Bellini’s Feast of the Gods (Cambridge, MA: interest in trompe l’oeil. I also thank the editorial staff of Athanor, Harvard UP, 1948). the organizers and participants of the Florida State Graduate Student Symposium, and the faculty and students of that program for the op- 4 Several explanations have been proposed for the motif, attesting portunity to present my research. to its multi-layered meanings, but not acknowledging the potential importance of literary sources besides Giotto’s so-called “burla della 1 See Book XXIII of Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture (New Haven: Yale mosca.” The most complete evaluation of the motif is A. Chastel, “A UP,1965). The story is later repeated by Vasari in slightly different form. Fly in the Pigment” FMR 19 (1986): 61-75, in which Chastel men- See note 33, below. tions very briefly Alberti’s encomium. See also A. Pigler, “La mouche peinte: un talisman,” Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts 24 2 E. T. Falaschi, “Giotto: The Literary Legend” Italian Studies 27 (1972): (1964): 47-64, which argues that the fly had an apotropaic function, 19, states that “Filarete does not reveal his source but the idea of a a concept derived from ancient sources and surviving in medieval painted insect deceiving the spectator is traceable to a practice in superstition. While this is a valid proposal, it fails to take into account fifteenth-century workshops.” Unfortunately, Falaschi does not state other traditions as well as contemporary pictorial innovations. what this practice might be or cite where there is any documentation of it. 5 See Alberti, On Painting, trans. John Spencer (New Haven: Yale UP, 1966), esp. 56: [describing the process of beginning a drawing] 3 See Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist “I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish, which is (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 102, and Boccaccio, Decameron, Sixth considered to be an open window through which I see what I want Day: Fifth Tale, as well as those in Vasari’s Life of the artist. For Re- to paint.” Later explanations in the treatise describe a similar model, naissance art and humor, see Kris and Kurz, 99-109 ; P. Barolsky, “In instead referring to the picture as an intersection of the visual pyra- Praise of Folly” Source 20 (2001): 8-12; Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor mid. ATHANOR XXVI KANDICE RAWLINGS age as an extension of the real space of the viewer. In either For the illusion to deceive, the subject depicted must be case, the placement of a trompe-l’oeil element subverts this life-size and shown in full view. For example, Carlo Crivelli’s conception of the painted image—the fly belongs in neither standing figure of St. Catherine of Alexandria (c.1491-4, Fig- the receding space of the painting nor in the domain of the ure 1), which measures 37.5 by 18.5 cm, approximately the viewer, nor can it land on and cast a shadow on an intangible size of a legal sheet of paper, depicts the figure of the saint plane. Therefore, in painting the trompe-l’oeil fly, artists well under life-size while representing the fly actual-size. acknowledge two different modes of pictorial mimesis: the The disparity in scale between the two serves to emphasize naturalism generally associated with Renaissance art and its the depiction of the fly and the saint in separate realms,9 revival of antique principles, and deceptive images, meant and resolves the spatial ambiguity potentially created by to fool the eye. Contemporary writers also make this distinc- the parallel surfaces of picture plane and niche wall.10 The tion. In his commentary on Dante’s Inferno in a comparison small detail of the fly reveals the artificiality of the painting of the poet’s and the painter’s abilities, Boccaccio writes, as a whole. “The painter endeavors that the figure painted by him… Petrus Christus deliberately includes such ambiguity in can deceive, either partly or wholly, the eyes of the viewer, his Portrait of a Carthusian (dated 1446, Figure 2), the earliest making him believe to exist that which does not.”6 Painters known example of a panel painting with a trompe-l’oeil fly. of trompe-l’oeil flies used both degrees of deception. In their By placing the fly on the edge of the frame itself, the artist paradoxical works, painting is simultaneously a form of truth, emphasizes the nature of the picture as a window, complete in its role as the mirror of nature, and of deception, in its with a fictive frame inscribed with the artist’s signature. In this ability to trick the viewer.7 picture, the trompe-l’oeil devices of frame and fly occupy a The success of trompe l’oeil depends on several factors, liminal space and connect the realms of the sitter and the besides the obvious criterion that it has to convincingly imi- viewer, although the frame separates them. The fly’s size con- tate its referent.8 For one, the trompe-l’oeil object must be a tributes to the ambiguity, since it seems as though it could be believable component of the physical context of the painting. painted to the sitter’s scale or to our own. A successful trompe Autonomous trompe-l’oeil paintings take advantage of this l’oeil requires both the trick and its discovery; because of the characteristic by representing mundane and ubiquitous ob- fly’s ambiguous size and placement, the viewer can easily jects integrated into the setting where the painting might be oscillate between different modes of viewing—understanding installed, such as Jan van der Vaart’s Violin Suspended from the fly as part of the painted scene and being tricked into a Peg (after 1674, Chatsworth, Devonshire Collection), in thinking it has actually landed on the frame. which the artist has painted a trompe-l’oeil violin on the door The fly in Christus’s painting has been explained as a of an English noble’s sitting room or, in a different century symbol of the “transience of life and the mortality of the sitter and medium, Duane Hanson’s Security Guard (1990, Collec- despite the perfection of his painted image.”11 In addition tion of Mrs. Duane Hanson), which achieves the extremely to using the fly as a symbol of vanitas, as in the Portrait of difficult illusion of a living person. Flies are common and a Carthusian, painters depicted insects in Christian art to might land on anything—this is surely a factor in Filarete’s sanctify nature in all its forms, inspired by the writings of legendary account of Cimabue’s deception.