Erhard Schön: Beyond Entertainment

Da Vinci was the first to draw an anamorphic image but in the 1500’s they took anamorphism beyond just a child’s eye. An artist named Erhard Schön created a woodcut he called Vexierbilder (secret images).

This woodcut was not done to entertain the viewer but to hide his political message from those he did not want to see it. The image looks almost to be a confused, mottled mess but upon further glance one sees that the edges include small images. Once the anamorphic image becomes clear, the little images around the edges become the accompaniment to the four faces depicted in an anamorphic way. This piece depicts four European rulers: Charles V, Ferdinand of Austria, Pope Paul III, and Francis I. People he apparently did not agree with politically.

Schön not only created images that were politically charged, he also created erotic imagery that was “taboo” for his era. In his piece, Out, You Old Fool, Schön depicts a young woman who is enticing an older man.

If you look closely you see she is actually steeling money and handing it to a younger man behind the curtain. There’s even a fool peering around the corner, alluding to the man being a fool for thinking a young woman would want to be with him. Once

you turn the piece you see the distorted image becomes the young man and woman engaged in an exotic embrace. This image would be one he would want to hide because this was a sexual image of a man and a woman together. Nude women were the norm but a piece depicting a nude male was almost unheard of.

Schön created numerous anamorphic woodblock images. Here is a link to one of his pieces in the British Museum that seemingly looks like a reference to the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Once the image is looked at in the correct perspective, one sees the hidden image of a “squatting and defecating peasant.”

Although these pieces are all done by using the correct perspective of the viewer, there are more ways to look at anamorphic images. Perhaps this will be my next question to answer: Besides paintings and woodcuts done on paper/canvas what other methods were used in anamorphism to show the correct perspective of a piece?