In the Chamber of Secrets many guests discover a colorful little desktop illusion, a round circle with a mysterious, swirling bit of artwork. It’s the result of an interesting story….
When we were planning Doug Henning’s sixth television special for NBC, I had a challenging idea for the opening illusion. Doug would be produced in the middle of a cylindrical mirror that reflected an anamorphic image of his portrait. I had a little example of this artwork to show at the meeting. Anamorphic art, constructed to be seen from a specific point of view, had been a popular experiment in European art (da Vinci explained the technique via an example in one of his notebooks). In the mid-1700s, there was a brief fashion for optical-illusion artwork that could only be seen by viewing it in a cylindrical mirror. The technique was forgotten until the 1970s, when art historians rediscovered the original techniques along with historical examples.
