When the Page Deceives the Eye: The Drawing That Refused to Be Seen from the Front

Late at night Leonardo da Vinci draws an eye stretched far beyond its natural form, and when his assistant calls it a mistake he answers that the assistant may be standing in the wrong place. The story grows from the anamorphic drawings of an eye and a child's head in his Codex Atlanticus: at midnight an Inspector of Visual Truth arrives with a glass scale, carrying a complaint from the drawn eye that it has been deformed, and records it as unfit for sight. Made to lower his head and look along the page from a sharp angle, the inspector watches the eye regain its proportions and open its lid, then leave the paper to tell him that the mind measures, compares and completes what is missing before asking him to call its interpretation reality. Leonardo draws a square that looks broken from the front and rises as a cube only from a marked spot on the floor, the words in the inspector's register stretch until he changes position and they read that no vision is innocent of the position from which it looks, and his seal turns into a doorway leading to the other side of his certainty. The book then becomes a lesson in anamorphic perspective and illusion drawing, from foreshortening, overlap and shadow to openings, stairways and impossible solids, and ends by asking the reader to draw an impossible form and then move.