ABSTRACT
Jon Gudmundsson elordi, or “the Learned,” was a common farmer, but also a self-taught, very perceptive naturalist, a sculptor, gifted painter, literary critic, celebrated poet, herbalist, healer, shaman and a well-known ghost-buster. He was born in the district of Strandir, in the Icelandic Westfjords, in 1574. Baroque aesthetics is obsessed with perspective and trompe l’oeils and the seemingly contrasting tensions within Jon the Learned’s A True Account can be resolved by recurring to an exquisitely Baroque concept, that of anamorphosis, the technique of concealing an image in the distortions of another one. Baroque vision, therefore, entails a discontinuity and no longer represents the organ able to know the truth by itself. Anamorphosis hides the truth from a superficial perusal of the image, and only reveals it if the viewer accepts to look at it from an “uncomfortable and unusual point of view.”.
