The story begins in ancient Greece, where the painter Zeuxis fooled birds with painted grapes only to be fooled himself by Parrhasius’s painted curtain. This episode explores trompe l’oeil, the French term for deceiving the eye, and how the technique of creating convincing three-dimensional space on a flat surface evolved from Pompeii’s painted windows through the perspective breakthroughs of the Renaissance to Baroque quadratura, Dutch still lifes, theater, cinema, fashion, and even literature.

We look at how foreshortening compresses figures on a ceiling so they appear to float above the viewer, how Andrea Pozzo painted an entire dome that only aligns from one brass disc on the floor, and how Sir James Thornhill painted shadows that trick the brain into inventing fluted columns. We also cover the painted flies of Carpaccio and de Barbari, Gijsbrechts’s cut-out easels, the violin painted on a door at Chatsworth House, forced perspective at the Teatro Olimpico, the flat hallway in Singin’ in the Rain, Wile E. Coyote’s tunnel, Richard Haas’s Chicago mural, Schiaparelli’s collaborations with Dalí, and the critics who read Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and a German fairy-tale writer as literary trompe l’oeil.

• Why the term was only codified in the early 19th century despite the practice dating back to at least AD 70
• How the Jesuits used quadratura to dissolve church walls and instill awe during the Counter-Reformation
• Van Hoogstraten’s 1678 theory of the cognitive dissonance that makes being fooled a pleasure
• How the illusion jumped from canvas to stage design, matte paintings, murals, and clothing
• A closing question about deepfakes, VR, and whether we now live in a perpetual state of trompe l’oeil