This would appear to work somewhat differently than the
anamorphosis of Holbein's "Ambassadors.
Unlike Dibbets and a handful of other artists who worked with anamorphic images in the relative isolation of their studios or in abandoned buildings, Zanela wanted to take
anamorphosis to the streets.
The poem's first depiction of this sequence, Lamia's change from serpent being, emblematizes how
anamorphosis, desire, and visual kinetics converge in a flash of "phosphor and hot sparks" further signified by the somatic pain of transformation (1-152).
Fahnestock's contribution to studies in the rhetoric of science rivals Hallyn's: whereas Hallyn demonstrates that the achievements of Copernicus and Kepler invoked both chiasmic irony and rhetorical
anamorphosis (Sun doesn't orbit Earth but Earth orbits Sun, 31-52), Fahnestock champions antimetabole as the master trope in scientific discovery (for instance, Newton's stone in the Third Law of Motion; Michael Faraday's model of the magnetic needle and the conductive wire in the description of the electrical field, 144-46).
Mangini starts from the pictorial technique of
anamorphosis, in which images are transformed and deformed when seen head-on, but are clear when viewed obliquely (for example, in Hans Holbein's "The Ambassadors").
In chapter 10 our author reconsiders the possibility of textual
anamorphosis by exploring Dulcinea's composite nature by means of an anecdote transmitted by Pliny on the characteristics of a painting of Helen by Zeuxis.
The exhibition was titled "AnamorPoses," a play on
anamorphosis, and in the eight lenticular prints, Ontani stages allegorical scenes in which he assumes postures and expressions that literally shift and multiply depending on the viewer's vantage point (each print incorporates three different images).
It needs to be stressed, however, that, by gesturing to such contorted images as Holbein's famous death's head in Henry James's The Ambassadors, Lacan "does not suggest that
anamorphosis is itself the gaze"; rather, "its dynamic, catching [the viewer/spectator] off guard with a mark of death, simply explains how the gaze works" (Saper, p.
Anamorphosis can contract in paradox to represent an ideal and logically impossible perspectivism: the city of Utopia is revealed to be a state both just and tyrannical (32); Spenser's landscape opens to a horizon "in which eros and imperium, garden and city, may yet paradoxically be one" (194).
Compared with Scaliger's "Dreams," this poem lacks a closing moment of distancing, or
anamorphosis, in which the speaker's error is recognized--what Scaliger's Neoplatonist contemporaries might have glossed as reason's entry as a charioteer to harness the passions.
Materializing before our eyes were objects that would have seemed impossible to locate: the Gaul coins discussed by Bataille in his first theoretical essay for the journal, "The Academic Horse," and the Egyptian amulets reproduced in its pendant a year later, "Base Materialism and Gnosticism"; an eighteenth-century
anamorphosis representing Saint Anthony of Padua and the infant Jesus, paired, just as it was in Documents, with Salvador Dali's Female Bathers, 1928; and even a drawing made by Andre Masson's nine-year-old daughter
This attempt at recovery and recontainment of the violent origin of representation thus follows the logic of
anamorphosis that Jacques Lacan outlines, for example, in his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.
