Entasis

Entasis (pronounced en-tuh-sis)

(1) In architecture, a slight convexity given to a column or tower, claimed to correct the optical illusion of concavity and create the perception of straight lines.

(2) In medicine and physiology, an involuntary or spasmodic muscular contraction (also called entasia (from the Greek ɛnˈteɪzɪə)).

(3) In typography & calligraphy, the thinning in the waist of a stroke, the technique used to compensate for the visual perception of a stroke with perfectly straight sides appearing slightly to bulge.

1745–55: From the Latin entasis, from the Ancient Greek ἔντασις (éntasis) (tension, straining), from εντείνω (enteínō) (to stretch or strain tight), the construct being enta, variant stem of enteínein (to stretch tight) + teínein (to stretch) + sis.  The –sis suffix was from the Ancient Greek -σις (-sis) and was attached to words in English often via Latin or French.  It was identical in meaning with the Latin –entia and the English –ing and was used (1) to form nouns of action or process (catharsis, dialysis, diagnosis, crisis etc), (2) in medicine to form nouns of condition (psoriasis, sepsis, tuberculosis, psychosis etc) and more generally (3) nouns as required (basis, oasis, thesis, stasis etc).  Entasis is a noun; the noun plural is entases.

The Entasis or Parthenon Principle

The Parthenon in Athens; it's the most celebrated use of entasis.

In modern architecture, entasis is the application of a convex curve to a surface for aesthetic purposes.  Its best-known use is in the columns from antiquity which curve slightly as their diameter is decreased from the bottom upward.  Because no relevant documents have yet been discovered, it’s not known whether the architects in antiquity applied the technique for aesthetic effect or as an engineering technique to enhance strength.  The latter is suggested by the design principle being described by Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (circa 75 BC–circa 20 BC) using the Greek word enteino (to stretch or strain tight), suggesting some emphasis on structural strength rather than appearance.  However, until contemporary records are uncovered, their reasons for using entasis remain mysterious, hence the two-thousand odd years of conjecture.  The earliest known documented view of the matter was that written by Greek mathematician and engineer Hero of Alexandria (circa 10-circa 70), is that entasis corrects the optical illusion of concavity in the columns that the human eye would create if the correction were not made.  

Basilica's western front of the Second Temple of Hera, a Greek temple in Paestum, Campania, Italy.

The Second Temple of Hera (circa 55 BC) was built in the Doric order, just north of the first.  For the visual effect of entasis to work, the convex curve has to be so slight as to be imperceptible and it's not known why the Second Temple of Hera has an entasis so pronounced the curvature is obvious; there is illusion of straightness.  The proportions are such that historians have speculated it must have been deliberate (presumably for structural strength) but it's at least possible the architect was afflicted by the desire many of his modern contemporaries share: The wish to produce something "original" and "new", the reason why so many modern buildings are so unpleasing to the eye, architectural awards & prizes handed out not for beauty and elegance but novelty and shock.

For millennia, entasis and its place in the history of architecture has been one of the most persistent tales from Antiquity but there have long been contrarians prepared to argue the concept, while not exactly a myth, is greatly exaggerated in significance.  In September 2026, Belgian mathematician Professor Alain Goriely (b 1967; professor of mathematical modelling at the University of Oxford) published the findings of his study, challenging the belief the Parthenon’s “curves” were included to correct “optical illusions” that would have made pure straight lines appear “distorted”.  What the professor’s modelling was said to reveal was (1) the “curves” are practically imperceptible and the alleged “illusion” they were claimed to correct doesn’t exist; “the illusions are illusory”.  Deconstructing Vitruvius, the study begins with the claim the sides of the Parthenon’s stylobate (base) are not horizontal but form a very flat “V”, rising gently 60 mm (2.36 inches) towards the centre.  According to Vitruvius, this was to correct the illusion that, when viewed as a whole, the base appears to “sag in the middle”.  For centuries, the “sagging effect” was attributed to one of two “tricks of the light”: (1) That because of the way light is interpreted by the human brain, long horizontal lines “appear to slump” towards the centre or (2) That the structure’s marble columns create the illusion; this based on the “Hering illusion” (where in 2D (two dimensions) parallel lines can appear “bowed” when intersected by other lines).  Professor Goriely found nothing to support either proposition, noting the Hering illusion (discovered in 1861 by German physiologist Ewald Hering (1834--1918) is most apparent when lines intersect at acute angles and the Parthenon’s columns are anyway “too close to the vertical” to produce the illusion.  Additionally, extensive modelling produced no proof the effect would manifest on the Parthenon even in 3D (three dimensions), viewed from any angle.

The persistent claims of entasis.

Those details were really footnotes in architecture textbooks, entasis the most famous of the legends.  What that suggests is “bulges” in the Parthenon’s columns (the curvature called entasis) were included by the builders to correct an optical illusion that would make them appear “too narrow” in the middle.  Not only did Professor Goriely found no evidence the illusion exists but the columns bulge by a mere 18 mm (less than ¾ inch) which, at that scale, is simply not perceptible to the human eye at a typical viewing distance.  What he doesn’t dispute is the architects may have had some reason to include variations in the dimensions; it’s just he found no evident they were there as “optical correctives”, the slopes on the base perhaps there for a reason as mundane as preventing puddles forming after rain; as every builder knows, only a very slight incline is needed for water to flow.  The very minor increase in width in the columns’ centre sections is more mysterious and may have been something to do with what would have been a very labor-intensive production process but there seems to be no optical effect.

Beyond the math, Professor Goriely speculates the reason the myth has proved so enduring was the extraordinary level of veneration granted to the engineers, philosophers and architects of Antiquity when, in the late Medieval period and (especially) the Renaissance, so many of the texts were “re-discovered” and a the perception emerged of Ancient Greece as a supremely knowledgeable and ingenious civilisation.  For centuries, in Western Europe, the Classical World was idealized and unless explicitly disproved (as came to be done of their medicine, cosmology and such), the texts were treated with great respect, thought something of “Civilization’s gold standard”.  In the modern age, the veracity of what Vitruvius wrote tended to be reinforced by internet users repeating the tale, search engines affording a greater credibility to “facts” appearing in the greatest volume.  Now of course, AI (artificial intelligence) bots have centuries of architectural texts from which to harvest information and given what Vitruvius who wrote about the Parthenon (400 years after its construction), came to be treated as something “scriptural” (despite the loss of loss of the many Greek texts about their temple architecture he claimed to have read when preparing his own), the authority was strengthened.  Untypically for an academic paper, the professor recommends not too much dwelling on his findings but commending instead: “Trust your own eyes, question what you see and decide for yourself whether the theory of optical corrections holds up.”  Professor Goriely concluded entasis “might be the oldest myth that we have” before mischievously adding “apart from religion.”

1964 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III Flying Spur; coachwork by H.J. Mulliner Park Ward.

One orthodoxy to emerge in the twentieth century was the famous Rolls-Royce radiator grille owed as much to Classical architecture as to being something there to prevent stones damaging the fragile core behind; if Rolls-Royce was going to be influenced by anyone, it’d be the architects of Antiquity.  According to chapter 4 of The Lexicon of Rolls‑Royce (the company doesn’t have web pages, it has chapters), what it styles as the “Pantheon Grille” was “…inspired by Rome’s imposing Pantheon temple, the Rolls-Royce grille is iconic. The Pantheon’s majestic columns were purposefully built with wider middle sections so that the human eye perceives each long pillar to be completely straight. It’s a perfect optical illusion and a genius stroke of design.  Taking inspiration from this, the Rolls-Royce grille is tactfully arranged using wider columns at the edge and thinner columns towards the middle to create an aesthetic illusion of symmetry when admired from the front. It’s a design that appears more perfect than nature intended.”  The days are gone when Rolls-Royce’s documents were characterized by understatement (it once described its engines’ power outputs as “adequate”), the vulgar numbers revealed only when German regulators humorlessly insisted.

While Professor Goriely’s computer models could find no evidence of the effect, a century-odd earlier, Rolls-Royce’s designers were convinced by the optical tricks of the Greeks and in 1925 integrated one of their optical techniques their new grille.  Although the “squared-off” shell dates from shortly after the company’s formation in 1904, not until 1928 did the now familiar grille with its upright bars become standardized.  Prior to 1925, the radiators were fronted by horizontal “slats” best thought of as “louvers” in that they functioned like “venetian blinds” (controlled by a lever next to the driver) to enable the airflow to be controlled (thus regulating engine temperature).  By the time of the release of the model Twenty in 1928, improvements in thermal-management technology meant the slats were no longer needed so the designers could start with a “clean sheet” and, being Rolls-Royce, the went neo-classical and built their own Pantheon, refining the ideas first seem in 1925 on the “New Phantom” (known retrospectively as the “Phantom I” (1925-1931) after new generations of the model followed).  So, although Professor Goriely’s math couldn’t detect any evidence entasis produced a detectable effect for those looking at the Parthenon, what Rolls-Royce does has been modelled and although slight, the effect of their trick is real.

Lindsay Lohan in Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé (2007-2017).  By the 1970s factory (mostly) had ceased to use the historic terms FHC (Fixed-Head coupé) and DHC (Drop-Head Coupé (DHC) and the revival in 2007 for the Phantom Drophead Coupé has proved (thus far) a nostalgic one-off.  Over the decades, the designers generally were successful in their adaptations as they were required to make the grille wider and lower but the Phantom would have benefited aesthetically if a more traditional approach had been taken with the headlamps (centre) and even hidden units (right) would have been more pleasing.  Still, twenty-first century customers seem more accommodating of stylistic innovation than earlier generations.

According to opticians, what the design does (wider bars at the edges, more slender towards the centre) is create the illusion of symmetry when viewed straight on (at even a slight angle there will be no effect).  That’s said to be because when viewing such a structure, the brain processes the image as a whole (not a sequence of individual bars) and, paradoxically, what the slight difference in width does is render an “artificial equalization”.   Because of the way the brain processes the sight of a series of “parallel bars”, were they equally-spaced and equally wide, there would be a “hollowing” effect with a “pinching” towards the centre, caused by the natural human tendency to perceive outer edges as tapering away.  The eye is an outgrowth of the brain and it’s the brain doing the processing; while “looking at a grill” might sound a simple task, in the Rolls-Royce grille there’s a lot of “information” and processing it all is an act of high-level cognition.

Hi-rise Pantheon: 1965 Rolls-Royce Phantom V.  This was about at tall as the grille got; it appeared on the Phantom V (1959-1968) & VI (1968-1990).

All else being equal, the brain tends first to focus on an image’s centre (that information sent to the fovea centralis (the part of the retina handling “sharp central vision”)) with the edges simultaneously entering the “peripheral vision” where spatial resolution decreases (the brain therefore gathering less precise detail about the outer dimensions).  All this happens in a fraction of a second but does still happen sequentially, the brain using “predictive modelling” to “fill in the blanks” and there is much to process, the grille a large, highly reflective three-dimensional object with repeating lines.  The brain’s visual cortex has much to do understand the contrasting light patterns and depth cues and that it does all this in a fraction of a second in an indication of how powerful a machine it is.  Additionally, Rolls-Royce further assists the brain in “manufacturing perfection by machining each bar with a very slight outward curve, not detectable to the naked eye.  The combination of this functionally imperceptible “width-shifting & curvature” uses the way the brain operates to induce the required corrective “shortcuts”.

The Pantheon Temple, Rome (left) and 1985 Rolls-Royce Camargue (right).

The Pantheon's Latin inscription M·AGRIPPA·L·F·COS·TERTIVM·FECIT isn't all that poetic and reads like a note the draftsman might have put on the blueprint (had there then been blueprints): it translates as "Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, made [this building] when consul for the third time.", crediting the Roman statesman & general, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa (circa 63 BC–12 BC) who commissioned the construction during his third consulship in 27 BC.  The Pantheon that stands today was rebuilt by Emperor Hadrian (Publius Aelius Hadrianus, 76–138; Roman emperor 117-138) circa 126 AD after the original structure suffered severe damage in a blaze; Hadrian chose to retain Agrippa's inscription as a tribute (not all the emperors were narcissists).  Since 609 AD, the Pantheon has been a Roman-Catholic church and is known as the Basilica Santa Maria ad Martyres (Basilica of St. Mary and the Martyrs).   In 1975, when the Camargue (1975-1986) was released, the novelty of it being the first Rolls-Royce designed using exclusively metric measurements (except for the odd carry-over component) attracted little attention but there was much comment about it being the first built with anything but a perfectly vertical grille.  The Camargue's grille was slanted at a (for mid-century Rolls-Royce) rakish 7^o.

Waftability

Parthenon Grill, Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Understandably, the malapropism “Parthenon grill” is sometimes heard (and there is a well-reviewed Greek restaurant in Murfreesboro, Tennessee of that name) and despite occasional claims, the Pantheon grille doesn't feature a classic entasis (slight swelling in the middle of a column to counteract the alleged illusion of concavity) but the slight curve of the bars is real and can be checked with equipment no more complex than a “straight-edge” (a 12 inch (300 mm)) metal ruler ideal for the purpose.  Although for much of the twentieth century Rolls-Royce was much associated with straight lines (the “knife-edge” models bodied by coach-builder Hooper between 1935-1959 the high point of the brief era of  blending of a severe rectilinearly with the flowing lines of the pre-war aesthetic although, despite the mix, the approach was not within the lineage of post-modernism) curves have often been a component and in 2009 Tom Purves (b 1949; CEO of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars 2008-2010) announced the neologism “waftability” was “the essence of the brand”.  That, he defined as “calm perfect motion and accelerating quickly without fuss”.  Back then (and 2009 seems now little less remote than the days of the Cold War (1947-1991)), the CEO was describing the relationship between the appearance of a static Rolls-Royce as something that embodied that definition, revealing the internal name for the “gentle, upswept line of the sill” on the new Ghost model was a “waftline” (actually borrowed from the fashion business), the idea being it created “a powerful, poised stance and makes the car appear to be moving when stationary.”

1988 Rolls-Royce Corniche Convertible.  Although rendered redundant by electric motors, the Pantheon Grille will endure; it will be wider and lower (as has already happened) and some functional use may even be found but as an essential element in “brand identity” it won't go away.

The significance of “waftability” was Rolls-Royce was then still in the business of making large-displacement engines running on fossil fuels sound and behave as if they were electric motors but, by 2023, the company announced the Spectre, the brand’s first purely electric car.  So it had taken a while but the interest in electric energy predated even the formation of the company in 1904.  Sir Henry Royce (1863–1933) was an engineer who had designed dynamos, electric crane motors and patented the bayonet-style light bulb fitting while Charles Rolls (1877–1910) as early as 1900 drove an electric car declaring it the almost ideal form of propulsion, observing: “The electric car is perfectly noiseless and clean. There is no smell or vibration, and they should become very useful when fixed charging stations can be arranged.  But for now, I do not anticipate that they will be very serviceable – at least for many years to come.”  So it proved.  By 2023 however, the technology was ready and so (more debatably) was the infrastructure and there is nothing better at waftability than something large, luxurious and electric, Rolls-Royce saying that some time in the next decade, their last car running on fossil fuel will leave the assembly line.  Nothing lasts forever and, having spent more than a century trying to make ICEs (internal combustion engine) as smooth and silent as electric motors, the times seem now to suit Rolls-Royce.  For others (such as Ferrari, Porsche, Dodge etc), selling to a customer base with an emotional attachment to the howl, throb & scream of gasoline (petrol) exploding in six, eight or twelve combustion chambers, the challenge is to find a way to make them content with a piped soundtrack.  Engineers have conquered matters of performance and even range but nostalgia may prove harder to package.  For Rolls-Royce however, the task is simpler because it’s purely visual: While an electric car needs no radiator and thus no protective grill, it can be guaranteed Pantheon Grilles, severely cut in stainless steel, will continue to appear.

Eidetic

Eidetic (pronounced ahy-det-ik)

(1) Of, relating to or constituting visual imagery vividly experienced and readily reproducible with great accuracy and in great detail.

(2) In anthropology, political science, sociology etc, of or relating to eidos (the formal content of a culture, encompassing its system of ideas, criteria for interpreting experience, etc).

(3) In psychiatry and neuroscience (as eidetic memory), of visual (or sometimes auditory) images, exceptionally vivid and allowing detailed recall of something previously perceived (most common in young children, the capacity appearing to diminish as language develops).

(4) Relating to or subject to such imagery.

(5) The (1) essence or (2) perfect, vision of an object or concept.

(6) In psychoanalysis (of dreams), as “eidetic memory”, a dream that can be “seen in the mind” so vividly it appears to be “movie-like”.

(7) In philosophy and phenomenology (as “eidetics”), the study of eidetic reduction (a technique used to help identify the essential components of a phenomenon by attempting to reduce it into its necessary essences).

(8) In literary criticism, writing sufficient evocative as to create in a reader’s imagination a “photo-realistic image” of what’s being described or discussed.

(9) In visual art (painting), a technique used to produce a work close to indistinguishable from a photograph (literally possible before advances in photography and photographic reproduction); the work so painted.

1924: From the from German eidetisch (pertaining to the faculty of projecting images), from the Ancient Greek εἰδητικός (eidētikós) (pertaining to images and used also in the sense of “pertaining to knowledge”), from eidesis (knowledge), the construct being εἶδος (eîd(os)) (form, shape) + -etic.  The -etic suffix was from the Ancient Greek -ητικός (-ētikós), from -έω (-éō) + -τικός (-tikós).  It was used to form adjectives meaning “pertaining to”, derived from nouns, most of which end in -esis and -esy.  Most English words formed with the suffix were from words formed in other languages (sometimes mixed), including Old, Middle and Modern French, Italian, Latin, and Ancient Greek.  Eidetisch was in 1924 coined by German psychologist Professor Erich Jaensch (1883-1940).  The back-formation dyseidetic refers to an individual found to be dyslexic (with regard to the visual aspect of written words) while the adjective “noneidetic” (not eidetic) seems one of English’s most significantly pointless words but presumably it’s useful for clinicians making case notes.  The now obsolete alternative spelling was edetic.  Eidetic is an adjevtive, eidetiker is a noun and eidetically is an adverb; the noun plural is eidetikers.  The special case of eidetics (in philosophy the study of eidetic reduction) is an example of a noun plural existing without a base noun

The term “eidetic memory” is used as a synonym of the popular “photographic memory” and an individual possessing the characteristic can in clinical use be described as an “eidetiker” (one with an “eidetic memory”); the medical literature however makes clear there is no evidence of any subject ever having exhibited a true “photographic memory” in the way the condition of “total recall” has been depicted in fiction and elsewhere in popular culture.  Sometimes, a subject may seem to have a “photographic memory” but, upon investigation, it has always been found to be something less impressive.  In the 1980s, one US television comedy had the governor of a state astonished by his secretary’s memory:

Secretary: “I’ve memorized the telephone numbers of the entire US Senate.”

Governor: “What?  All of them?”

Secretary: “Well, there are only two.”

That worked also as a “blonde joke”, a breed now proscribed under threat of cancellation.  In general use, what “photographic memory” usually indicates is “an exceptionally good memory” but often this manifests in specialized fields of learning rather than general experience.  As something more generalized, it’s most common in young children who have, by definition, a limited length of memory from which to draw and the capacity appears usually to diminish as language develops.  In adults, it definitely is a spectrum condition so the adjectival senses (the comparative “more eidetic”, the superlative “most eidetic”) can be used and in neuroscience publications “semi-eidetic (partly or partially eidetic) does appear.  That said, in the literature, there are cases of patients who suffer from being “unable to forget”, a genuinely disturbing condition for those with memories of traumatic events.  Even then however, that is an instance not of “total recall” but rather the recollected events being ones they’d prefer to forget but cannot. 

The legacy: Zur Eidetik und Integrationstypologie: Arbeiten aus dem Institut für psychologische Anthropologie an der Universität Marburg/Lahn (On eidetics and integration typology: Works from the Institute for Psychological Anthropology at the University of Marburg/Lahn, 1941) by Professor Rudolf Jaensch, Barth, Leipzig, Germany.

Although at times one of the most cited and influential psychologists of the inter-war era (1919-1939), Rudolf Jaensch is now remembered only for his work on eidetic analysis, his “eidetic hypothesis formation” still one of the standard models in psychology.  His other work in the theories of constitutional types are now little studied, largely because his reputation was sullied by his enthusiastic commitment to and prosecution of the National Socialist Gleichschaltung (coordination) and restructuring of professional & academic life in Germany after the Nazi Party gained power in 1933.  Although Jaensch joined the party only some months after Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) was appointed chancellor (the oft-quoted reference to the Nazis “seizing power” is misleading, the political & military elite miscalculating in thinking having Hitler as head of a government in which the Nazis were in a minority would leaving him “manageable” and thus “handed him” the office)) and was thus susceptible to being derided by the “old fighters” as one who joined the movement only for career advancement, he’d been affiliated with a number of the party’s organs since mid-1932.  However, he certainly made up for lost time and in March 1933 was one of several hundred professors to sign a declaration of support for the new regime but unlike many of them who genuinely were seeking only to protect their careers and families, Jaensch was an activist, denouncing those who dissented from the party’s new orthodoxies and was particularly interested in excluding Jews from academic life, seeking not only to secure their dismissal but also discredit their work.  That of course resulted in the migration of many Jewish and engineers and scientists, something that at least partially realized Hitler’s core ideological obsession but greatly would come to disadvantage Germany during World War II (1939-1945).  Hitler may have disdained “Jewish physics” but the British and Americans did not as the Irish-born UK journalist & politician Brendan Bracken (1901–1958) would later (and not wholly facetiously) explain: “We won the war because our German scientists were better than their German scientists”.

Portrait of Martin Heidegger (2017) by Mathieu Laca (b 1982).  A painter can use a retreat from photorealism for reasons that may be artistic or political.

Jaensch's involvement with the Nazis so tainted to his reputation that in the post-war years only his seminal work in eidetic theory remained “acceptable” although the “guilt by association” paradigm was never much of a feature of post Nazi Germany and that he wrote a forward to the published version of Hans Bender’s (1907-1991) revised doctoral dissertation Zur Experimentalpsychologie des Unterbewußten und der außersinnlichen Wahrnehmung (On the Experimental Psychology of the Subconscious and Extrasensory Perception) seems not to have affected Dr Bender’s flourishing career in the 1950s.  There may also been some appeal in the English-speaking world, it being hard to think of a better name then “Bender” for a psychologist working in the field of extrasensory perception.  Unfortunately, in Germanic use, while the name “Bender” was from the Middle High German benden (to bend; to twist), use was typically occupational and applied to (1) a cooper (barrel-maker), with Bender a clipping of Fassbinder or Fassbender (a cooper (ie someone who builds and repairs wooden barrels or casks by bending staves) or (2) a craftsman or metalworker (the artisans and smiths who shaped materials like wood or metal using techniques of bending and curving.  Less commonly, it could be topographic (someone who lived near a sharp curve or bend in a river or a road).  Whether, had Professor Jaensch lived to undergo the de-Nazification process of the post-war years, had he apologized for his conduct, he’d have been “sort of forgiven” in the mood of selective generosity that has seen figures like conductor Herbert von Karajan (1908–1989) and philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) to one degree or another rehabilitated is unlikely; Karajan’s association with the regime was pure careerism while Heidegger’s flirtation was brief and soon abandoned whereas Jaensch died an unrepentant Nazi and his only legacy is eidetic theory.

Eidetic memory has never appeared in the APA's (American Psychiatric Association) DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), either as a diagnostic term or disorder, presumably because it’s regarded as a natural variation in the human condition.  Although an acknowledged psychological phenomenon, the DSM does not regard an exceptional memory (however described) as pathological, even when discussing the functioning of memory in the context of neuro-cognitive or dissociative disorders.  Despite, that, the term “eidetic” is far from unknown in the psychiatric & psychological literature (professional & popular) but many publications cast a much wider net than the DSM that focuses on the diagnosis of metal disorders rather than reviewing the range of “normal” human characteristics.  So, while there are books devoted to discussing eidetic memory (and related topics) and the “self-help” shelves in bookshops often have volumes on “improving memory” or “developing a photographic memory”, that’s very different from “eidetic memory”.  For example, psychiatric teaching material describes eidetic images as visual memories of almost hallucinatory vividness but the DSM’s editors applied the same rationale when not including Aphantasia (an inability voluntarily to recall or form mental images) in their editions, the DSM being concerned primarily with phenomena insofar as they constitute clinically significant dysfunction or form part of a recognized disorder.  The eidetic memory spectrum does though remain a recognized psychological phenomenon and for clinicians that’s helpful because of the need to differentiate instances from hallucinations, a very different symptom.

In painting, there is a long “eidetic” tradition of works so photorealistic that, unless closely examined (and certainly when reproduced photographically) can be assumed to be photographs, some artists in recent years even adopting the technique as a signature.  Those still able to view art for pleasure can enjoy the perceptual ambiguity (and maybe even enjoy being fooled) but art critics know paintings are there to be criticized and while the sheer technical prowess of the artist can be acknowledged, photorealistic painting often has been treated with hostility.  It wasn’t always so because photorealism predated photography as some artists sought to achieve what would later come to be called the “hyper-realistic” and, in a nice linguistic paradox, it would be decades (well into the twentieth century) before technology had improved to the point at which a developed photograph could match the “realism” achieved by the most skilled artists, a group working not only in paint but also with pencils and, remarkably, even charcoal, a substance uniquely suitable for emulating monochromatic images.  The objection of latter-day critics was not only the predictable: “Why not just take a photograph?” but also it being known many artists actually took photographs and copied these to create their paintings.  To many critics, that meant it was less “art” than “drafting”.

Telephone Booths (1967), acrylic on Masonite by Richard Estes (b 1932), Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, Spain.

The classic exponent of the technique was US artist Richard Estes and Telephone Booths is his best-known work in this vein.  At the technical level, the piece was most accomplished because for a painter, intrinsically, a tree in a park is a less challenging subject than some Manhattan telephone booths in their surrounds, the work demanding the rendering on a two dimensional surface, glass, shiny metal, reflections and transparencies, a grab of multiple overlapping optical images of simultaneous movement.  Now on permanent display at the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the exhibit’s curatorial notes detail the production process, the composition beginning with several photographs taken of a row of telephone booths at the intersection of Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and 34^th Street, subsequently combined as a montage.  The hyperrealism inherent in emulating photography owes something to the tradition of trompe l'oeil (deceives the eye) in that the works often were a deliberate attempt “…to confuse and disorient the viewer.  Despite depicting a recognizable scene, the complexity of the framing and the blurring of reflections require an additional effort of concentration, since nothing can be grasped at a single glance.”  The choice of setting does though hint at the way artists are selective to make the effect work, glass having the necessary characteristics to create ambiguities, the stuff simultaneously reflective and transparent.  What Estes did was use the accumulation of reflections as a “device of distortion”, some images sharply defined on the glass while others appearing on metallic surfaces slightly were warped while still allowing concurrent recognition of the booths before the eye and the buildings “behind us”, cues such as the signs of the Macy's and Woolworth there as markers of familiarity.  Making a painting from a photograph may sound simple (for those with the skill and time) but what Estes did was not mere transcription for he took his montage and rearranged it, Telephone Booths depicting a scene no single photograph recorded.  That didn’t exactly mean “montage beget collage” but it was an interesting take on “appropriating and reconstructing reality”.  For those who like the idea of telephone booths as subjects there are now fewer from which to choose but in many cities there are survivors (some re-purposed as Wi-Fi hotspots) and in Australia, one that provided vital communications when cellular (mobile) services were disabled by bushfires has been granted “Protected Heritage” status.

Central Savings (1975), oil on canvas by Richard Estes.  Reflected images were a feature of the photorealists, the scenes providing a useful layer of “pre-distortion”.

Tellingly, while Estes usually left his cityscapes devoid of human presence, in Telephone Booths there were four figures, each partially visible in the temporary sanctuary of their booth, backs to the viewer.  As a trick on the path to photorealism that was a wise choice because the almost flat expanses of a trench coat’s fabric makes the effect easier to achieve than the contours and colours of a human face.  However, for professional critic and ultracrepidarian alike, the meaning beneath (or perhaps “beyond”) is there for the viewer to take from it what they will, those better-versed in critical theory, tending sometimes to impart meaning, seeking to “know the mind of the artist”.  The Italian art critic Sandro Parmiggiani (b 1946) described those “on the phones” as “metaphors for broken voices and a faceless humanity, remaining unknowable within those impenetrable spaces, to which the stains that border their metallic edges allude as a visual rhyme, increasing the mystery and the visual bewilderment.”  Now we know.  The author John Updike (1932–2009) was no less a deconstructionist, declaring: “We know nothing about the two people on the far right, nothing except that their clothing is light-colored; we know even less about the couple on the left—they seem transparent in their oblique reflections. Thanks to the label of metropolitan crowd, these people have been reduced to mere signifiers affixed to telephone booths; like bytes.  The sounds of a computer or the strokes of a typewriter take their place and convey information. The emptiness of this information contrasts with the visual richness that the painter has imparted without sparing any effort, constructing a profoundly tender artistic irony.”  It was the Anglo-Irish satirist & Anglican cleric Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) who in the poem On Poetry: a Rhapsody (1733) included the lines:

Or else perhaps he may invent
A better than the poet meant;
As learned commentators view
In Homer more than Homer knew.

That pair of couplets became famous as a critique of overly obsessive literary critics & scholars anxious to find in texts hidden meanings and profundity, the objective perhaps not to inflate the esteem in which the author was held but enhance their own reputations; wisdom displayed by pointing out what the professor down the corridor failed to notice.  Swift may have made a famous point but mostly he was ignored and has of late been steamrollered by the post-modernists & deconstructionists able to construct “meanings in the meanings” although, unfortunately, so jargon-laden are some of their texts the meanings these formalist's documents sometimes barely are decipherable to all but fellow semioticians.  The industry has of course moved on from Homer and the words of figures like Bob Dylan (b 1941) and Jonathan Swift’s now more famous namesake (Taylor Swift (b 1989)) have been analysed as closely as any theologian has studied the Scriptures.  Dylan presumably was on occasions amused by finding out what “he really meant” and was modest, telling one interviewer he was “just a song & dance man” and another that those who “…called his lyrics poetry, probably hadn’t read much poetry”.  Still the critics clearly prevailed because in 2016 the Swedish Academy awarded Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him one of the more publicized laureates of recent decades.  Of Ms Swift’s oeuvre, meaning may be easier to find: she’s of her generation so the songs are “all about her”.

Hot Fudge Sundae (1972), oil on canvas by Ralph Goings.

The US painter Ralph Goings is sometimes said to have made photorealism “his signature” but it seems to have been more “his calling”, drawn to the technique because of a genuine “aesthetic objection” to the way pop-art artists of the 1960s were tending to expressionism (and even mannerism) in their depictions of simple, mundane objects.  Those approaches were of course “just another path to meaning” but for his bank buildings, diners (condiment sets very much a theme) and pick-up trucks, Goings emulated the camera’s objectivity although, without the original photographs, it’s not known if some licence was taken although almost certainly that happened.  While a dent in the tailgate of a parked pick-up truck is unexceptional, maybe it was added for some optical verisimilitude.  Estes’s Telephone Booths was admitted not to be a “pure” piece of eidetic imagery but a compositional piece that was a construct of what such an image might have been; Goings by contrast claimed always to be “true to the original”.

That should be treated as a statement of intent but Goings never exhibited the 35mm color slides that were his “intermediate tool” but he admitted going “beyond the photographs” in tweaking details such as light and color saturation or adjusting an inconvenient shadow.  That he used slides was also of significance because frequently, in a darkened room, he would project the images onto a primed, blank canvas, enabling him to bypass freehand drawing, instead with a pencil “tracing the grid”, meticulously rendering every the edge of every shape, contour or shadow.  That done, what’d he’d have was a kind of “paint-by-numbers” set, the canvas now an assembly of outlined shapes awaiting paint, the original photograph a legend of the color scheme.  So it could be called “craft” and the much skill and patience was demanded but whether that meant it should be called  “art” divided critics.  However, an artist’s relationship with the critics is just one aspect of life and there’s also the relationship with the auction houses and the customers; the current record sale price for a painting by Goings was some US$700,000 and his stuff definitely is now part of the “art market”.

Airstream (1970), oil on Molino by Ralph Goings (1928-2016), Mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (Museum of modern art, Ludwig Foundation), Museumsquartier in Vienna, Austria.  Molino is a fabric-based support, often a plain-weave or un-primed textile material akin to the specialized canvas or heavy cotton & linen weaves used in Europe.  It's known also as “cotton duck canvas” but that has nothing to do with Anatidae feathers, "duck" from the Dutch doek (cloth). 

More eye-catching still was Airstream.  Still in production after 90 years, vintage Airstreams are a collectable, distinguished by their polished aluminium skins, a dramatic look that has at times been controversial because, on sunny days, the reflections from the large surface area were thought to be “distracting” for other road users.  Some owners of latter-day Shelby American Cobras (the originals (1962-1967) all painted) who opted for the expensive option of polished aluminum bodywork also came to rue the decision, the seductive curves showing every fingerprint.  The big Airstreams did however make a great photograph and, as Ralph Goings knew, a great photo had the potential to be a great painting though in his genre, it had to be the right photo.  Airstream was one of his favourites because he thought it best represented the possibilities in his technique and although what he did was in a sense “mechanical”, it could also be exacting, a few square inches of canvas sometimes taking days to complete.  For Goings, the paintings are best thought of as his “love affair with America”.

Lindsay Lohan rendered in the style of nineteenth century Impressionism (right) by Gemini.ai.  The digital version was based on a photograph (left) of her in a Jill Sander (b 1943) gown in light chartreuse from the Spring 2023 collection (with a Tyler Ellis (b 1984) Clutch, Joseph Saidian & Sons Vintage Marquise & Baguette Cut Diamond, Anabela Chan Orchid Diamond Cascade Earrings and Piferi Fade Sandals by Alfredo Pīferi (b 1987)) while attending the Disney Legends Awards ceremony, Anaheim, California, August, 2024.  On the day, although the environment was not optimized for photography, the light and breeze cooperated, the gown’s fabric swishing in a way the Impressionists would have painted, even had the air been still.  In the 2010s, as video cards became more powerful, software emerged to allow users to take photographs and re-create them in a wide variety of modes including pencil sketches, water colors, oils and even styles such as cubism.  This was the opposite process from that used by hyperrealists such as Estes and Goings; now generative AI makes possible just about anything able to be displayed on a screen.

The paradox of course was that Airstream was the exemplar of a painting functionally indistinguishable from a photograph thus illustrating the usual critique: What’s the point?  Why not just produce prints of the photograph, something able to be done in limitless quantities and at marginal cost?  That’s a classic utilitarian question and one that ignores a concept like l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake) but then, other than as generators or economic value, utilitarians likely thought society gained little benefit from movements such as vorticism, cubism, abstraction, expressionism and such.  There was also elitism in the disdain; photorealism associated with craft, folk-art, advertising, ordinary consumer objects and other fields tainted by commercialism (although the art-mafia was untroubled by their business being focused on money like few others).  Still, contemporary conceptual and abstract art was thought intellectually sophisticated in a way “copying photographs” could never match, the technical virtuosity less valued than the imagination of the “true artist”.  Despite all that, photorealism did find a niche and is now an accepted part of the industry.

The Hay Wain (1821), oil on canvas by John Constable (1776–1837), National Gallery, London (left) and Flatford Mill from a Lock on the Stour (circa 1811), oil on canvas by John Constable, Royal Academy of Arts, London (right).

John Constable was among the last generation of painters to live before the age of photography and although now regarded as one of the greatest of Britain’s landscape artists, in his lifetime he enjoyed only modest commercial success; not until the age of 52 was he elected to the RA (Royal Academy of Arts).  The two paintings above are examples of the different ways he painted, the high Romantic Flatford Mill from a Lock on the Stour noticeably less “realistic” than The Hay Wain, a work among his most elegiac.  Viewed retrospectively, as the technology of photography improved, there would have been times when each of these paintings could be deemed photorealistic (if, for purposes of comparison, rendered in gray-scale or sepia) but that was not the dominant artistic measure of the era.  It’s not known when Constable made his remark: “My pictures will never be popular for they have no handling, but I do not see handling in nature” (the quote appearing (undated) in Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Esq (1843) by the UK-based US genre painter Charles Robert Leslie RA (1794–1859)) but it’s tempting to think it might have been before painting Flatford Mill, a work executed with notable “handling”.  Constable used “handling” (then trade jargon among the critics) to describe the painter’s visible manner of applying paint, the brushwork, facture, finish and characteristic “touch” by which a viewer could see how the artist worked their brush.  The comparison was something like the difference between watchmakers who took care to conceal their creations’ movements and those who made visible the wheels & cogs, Constable in effect saying “nature shows no painterly technique, so why should an artist?”  Time of course doesn’t display the mechanism of how it works any more than do the clouds in the sky: both just are.  The critics though were society’s opinion-makers (especially among those who actually paid arts for their work) and in Constable's time, an academic landscape painter of renown was expected to demonstrate skilful, controlled brushwork that made visible the mechanics of the action.  Not all did it in the same way but the most commercially successful had their ways of making obvious how the oil was blended and modulated, clouds, rocks, foliage and all the elements of landscape rendered through established conventions.  As well as the beauty of what was being depicted, the artist's execution was there to be admired.

The Opening of Waterloo Bridge seen from Whitehall Stairs, 18 June, 1817 (circa 1832), oil on canvas by John Constable, Tate Britain, London.  In the industry’s classification system, Constable is listed as a painter of landscapes, in the Romantic tradition but as much as anything, he was a painter of skies and cloudscapes.

Constable made no secret he thought these conspicuous displays of artistic virtuosity as “bravura”, preferring to be what he called a “natural painter” depicting the “natural environment”.  Discarding, the bravura taught during his student years, he eschewed “showing off” and let nature do the talking; nature having no brushstrokes and trees, clouds and sunlight without “handling”, manifesting only as optical phenomena.  That was what Constable wanted to paint.  He was though a realist and in some of his work there is much of his signature “handling”, rough, broken, apparently (though doubtlessly not) spontaneous brushwork applied in flecks, dabs, flecks, streaks and thick impasto (paint applied thickly to create a topography of peaks and crests that, in physically extending from the surface, lends something of a 3D (three-dimensional) effect), sometimes obviously using paint unmixed and straight “from the tube”.  Constable didn’t change his view that he wanted viewers to focus on the painting rather than the independent performance of the painter but whether “Constable 2.0” was an evolving artist or one adapting to commercial reality in “surrendering art to artifice” can be debated but what no historians dispute is that the later impressionists owed a debt to this exemplar of the Romantic movement.  Constable now is more highly regarded than ever he was in his lifetime.