Anamorphosis

Anamorphosis is an image deliberately distorted so that it appears correctly proportioned only from a particular viewpoint or through a reflecting device.

Perspective (graphical): A system for representing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. Anamorphic drawings use perspective rules to compensate for an oblique viewing angle.
Leonardo da Vinci: An Italian Renaissance artist, engineer, and scientist known for notebooks spanning art and natural philosophy. His notebooks include early examples of deliberately distorted images.
The Ambassadors (Holbein): Hans Holbein the Younger's 1533 double portrait, notable for a distorted skull in the foreground. Its skull becomes recognizable when viewed from a sharply oblique angle.
Street art: Visual art created in public spaces, often directly on buildings, streets, or other urban surfaces. Anamorphic street works align from a designated spot to create an apparent three-dimensional scene.
Memento mori: An artistic reminder of human mortality, often represented by skulls or decaying objects. Holbein's anamorphic skull makes mortality visible only from a displaced viewpoint.
Projective geometry: The study of properties preserved by projection, including incidence and cross-ratio. Its transformations describe how an image can be warped and still reconstruct correctly.
Jean-François Niceron: A seventeenth-century French Minim friar who studied perspective and optics. His treatise on perspective systematized techniques for constructing anamorphic images.
The Ambassadors' skull: The elongated skull painted across the foreground of Holbein's 1533 portrait The Ambassadors. It is a canonical perspective anamorphosis embedded in a celebrated painting.
Forced perspective: A visual technique that manipulates apparent size or distance through spatial arrangement. It changes the scene's arrangement, whereas anamorphosis distorts an image for a particular view.
Vanitas: A genre of art emphasizing life's transience and the futility of worldly possessions. Anamorphic skull imagery can sharpen vanitas themes by hiding death in plain sight.

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