ABSTRACT
Almost 400 years after Aristotle, Pliny the Elder wrote about the origin of painting, sculpture, illusion, and human perception in his book, Natural History, ca. A.D. 77-79.
You can almost imagine Pliny, relaxing on the patio of his villa in Pompeii, telling the story of howButades of Corinth, seeing a line drawing his daughter had traced on the
wall from her lover’s shadow, filled it in with clay and fired the relief to make the world’s first portrait.[5] Maybe later in the evening, Pliny would tell of the painting contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, two great painters of the fifth century B.C. Smiling at the memory, Pliny tells you of how Zeuxis created a still life containing a bunch of grapes painted so realistically that the birds flew down from a nearby tree to eat them. Seeing that, Parrhasius invited Zeuxis to remove the curtain from his painting to reveal the image. When Zeuxis tried to do that, he discovered that the painting of the curtain was so realistic, that he was fooled into thinking it could be drawn aside. Pliny concludes with the account of Zeuxis ceding victory to Parrhasius, saying: “I have deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.”[6] As Pliny undoubtedly noted, the creation of realistic images fascinates us, and each successive development in the visual arts has been influenced by that fascination.
