Illusion Diffusion uses Stable Diffusion to produce illusion artwork.
The image above was produced by uploading an image of the Mona Lisa and specifying the prompt “colour photograph of an Italian city in the Renaissance” (illusion strength 1 and seed 0).
Below is Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring modified with the prompt “Amsterdam canals in 17th century” (illusion strength 1.8 and seed 0).
Master of Number, a collage by Gianni Sarcone presented at the Museum of Illusions in Kuala Lumpur in 2001.
“The Great Matrimonial Admonisher and Pacificator,” a reversible lithograph published in Baltimore in 1861.
Via the Library of Congress.
For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.
— Pablo Casals, Joys and Sorrows, 1970
In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Giorgio Vasari notes that in January 1494, while Michelangelo was working on his first full-scale stone figure, “there was a heavy snowfall in Florence and Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s eldest son … wanting, in his youthfulness, to have a statue made of snow in the middle of his courtyard, remembered and sent for Michelangelo and had him make the statue.”
A heavy snowfall did occur that month: One chronicler wrote, “There was the severest snowstorm in Florence that the oldest people living could remember.” And it was a tradition on such occasions for outstanding artists to sculpt large snow figures, including the Marzocco, the heraldic lion that is the city’s symbol. But “What snow figure Michelangelo fashioned is not known,” writes critic Georg Brandes, “only that it stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici.”
Seventeen years later, Brussels residents protested the wealthy Habsburgs by building 110 satirical snowmen, more than half of which were said to be pornographic. There’s no visual record of that, either. It’s known as the Miracle of 1511.
In 2007, during a construction project at 39 Avenue George V in Paris, artist Pierre Delavie draped the site in a scaffolding tarpaulin of 2,500 square meters printed with a distorted image of the site’s former structure. Crows and cornices of polystyrene were even added to complete the effect. When the work was finished, pieces of the trompe-l’œil drapery were sold at auction.
Art dealer Ambroise Vollard was acquainted with many of the foremost artists of the early 20th century, and as a result he appears often in their work. Above are portraits by Cézanne, Renoir, and Bonnard, and he sat also for Rouault, Forain, Vallotton, Bernard, and Picasso.
Picasso wrote, “The most beautiful woman who ever lived never had her portrait painted, drawn, or engraved any oftener than Vollard.”
chirurgic
adj. manual; relating to work done by the hand
armillary
adj. consisting of hoops or rings
operosity
n. laboriousness, painstaking endeavour; elaborateness
idoneous
adj. appropriate; fit; suitable; apt
From Hungarian typographer Peter Virágvölgyi, a beautiful instance of “meta-calligraphy.”
Thomas Deininger makes assemblages of trash that take on new meaning when viewed from a particular angle — offering a new perspective on environmental degradation.
The first nonhuman artist to be given her own art exhibition was a female pig rescued from a South African slaughterhouse in 2016. When her keeper, Joanne Lefson, noticed that the pig ate everything in her stall except some paintbrushes, she taught her to hold a brush in her mouth and apply paint to an easel, and Lefson could sell the resulting works to raise funds for the sanctuary.
Pigcasso’s works have been exhibited in the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, and China. In 2021 German collector Peter Esser paid £20,000 for her painting Wild and Free, a record price for an artwork created by an animal. Altogether the pig’s sales have raised more than $1 million. She died in March 2024, one day before Jane Goodall could arrive to meet her.
