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Posted on April 23, 2010 |

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WHAT IS ANAMORPHIC ART?

Anamorphosis is a form of perspective. It obeys all the laws of perspective, usually more strictly than any other form. It is, however, an extreme form of perspective in that an anamorphic picture is usually distorted in some way.

To remove the distortion and bring the image back to the way you normally expect to see it, you have to view it in a special way. This might be using a curved mirror or from a particular direction. Because you have to look in a particular way or from a special point, only one person can see it correctly at a time. So the artist is being very intimate with the viewer. These anamorphic images do not make sense unless you know how or where to place your eye. They are hidden until you look from the correct place.

ANAMORPHOSIS AND TROMPE L OEIL

Trompe Loeil is often confused with anamorphic art because Trompe Loeil literally means to deceive the eye. The deception is in the reality it portrays. A typical Trompe Loeil painting is a still life which often depicts a notice board with letters and other objects stuck on it. When the painting is hung on a wall it looks like a real notice board. The deception is to trick you into thinking that it is real. Some anamorphic art adds deception by concealing the anamorphic image in an otherwise normal looking picture. This has nothing to do with Trompe Loeil. There is no distortion in Trompe Loeil, only illusion of reality.

WHAT ANAMORPHOSIS IS NOT

It is not stretching Perspective does not stretch in the normal way. To understand this see the discussion of foreshortening in the description of perspective and the comparison of the quick and dirty methods of making anamorphoses and the true plane anamorphoses. However, you can get good approximations to

Anamorphic Art
a special instance of perspective

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Art of the Grid

The practice of laying a grid on top of a drawing, then painstakingly copying each line of the drawing to the corresponding cell of a blank grid seems old-fashioned in these days of pervasive photocopying and electronic image manipulation. Nonetheless, the underlying idea of transferring information from one grid to another has a long history in both mathematics and art. When the blank grid differs from the original grid, for example, a drawing can suffer intriguing distortions. In art, the result is sometimes called an anamorphic picture. Mathematically, you're looking at the results of a type of transformation or mapping. To create one sort of anamorphic picture, you start with a piece of paper ruled into square cells and another ruled with the same number of trapezoids. Draw your picture on the square grid. Then carefully copy the contents of each square of the original grid to the corresponding trapezoid of the other grid, stretching the lines of the drawing to make sure everything fits together. You end up with a distorted version of the original picture. Interestingly, if you now look at the final drawing at the proper angle from the edge, it appears undistorted.

You've probably experienced the same effect while riding in a car and encountering the word "STOP" painted on the roadway just before an intersection. The white letters look normal from where you are sitting. If you were standing beside the sign instead of riding toward it, however, you would find that the letters are actually stretched out. Artists have long used the same idea to create visual puzzles. In such examples, a viewer sees an object correctly only if he or she finds the right angle at which to look at the picture. One of the most famous examples is in a painting called "The Ambassadors," made by the German artist Hans Holbein, the Younger (1497-1543). It shows two men standing in front of tables overflowing with books, instruments, and globes (see http://sunsite.auc.dk/cgfa/hholbei2/p-hholb2-4.htm). At their feet, the artist painted a weird shape that turns out to be a grinning skull when you hold the picture at a slant and view it in the right way. Various artists have tried more elaborate schemes. It's possible, for example, to draw or paint a picture so that you can tell what it is only if you look at its reflection in a mirror shaped like a cylinder or a cone. Other pictures must be reflected in shiny spheres, mirrored pyramids, or other reflecting shapes to reveal their true identity. In the March American Journal of Physics, James L. Hunt and his colleagues at the University of Guelph in Ontario provide equations that describe the mathematical transformations underlying the most common anamorphic images found in art--the plane, cylindrical, and conical cases. The physicists even offer a service that transforms any submitted photograph into its anamorphic counterpart (see http://physics.uoguelph.ca/morph/main.html). Artist Douglas D. Peden of Essex, N.Y., has explored another intriguing aspect of grid transformations to create visually arresting paintings, in which each gracefully distorted abstraction ripples its own, subtly musical tale.

"Transfiguration" by Douglas Peden. Peden started out in nuclear engineering, but he left the field during the 1960s to become an artist. In 1970, he moved to the Adirondack region of New York state. "I found the combination of the natural beauty and solitude supportive of my creative needs," Peden says. "It also allowed me to pursue my own vision without the distraction and influence of the prevailing art fashions, styles, and market forces." Peden's early paintings featured free-flowing amoebic forms radiating vibrant, contrasting colors. Later, he turned to abstract landscapes--trees, sky, water, land, and structures presented symbolically and rhythmically in great, horizontal swaths. His visual patterns, with their carefully manipulated thematic variations, reminded one of musical forms such as the classical sonata.

Peden then began to formalize his approach, developing a geometric language and framework that he could use to create his abstract narratives. Instead of working with a Cartesian grid represented by horizontal and vertical straight lines, Peden focused on coordinate systems based on wavy lines. He calls his scheme "wave space," or "GridField," geometry. Specifying the wavelength and amplitude, he starts off with a set of wavy parallel lines oriented in the vertical direction. The corresponding set of lines in the horizontal direction is then chosen as a function of the vertical field. The combination produces what he calls a "gridfield" configuration. "If wave field amplitudes are reduced to zero, the gridfield becomes a Cartesian grid," Peden notes. "In other words, the commonly used Cartesian grid system is one of many grid/gridfield configurations."

Peden then weaves in another meandering wave field to produce additional distortions, making the final grid look like a strangely crumpled piece of fabric. The choice of grid is up to the artist, as is the color of each of the grid's cells. "The shapes, themes, rhythms, and spatial textures are defined and influenced by the geometric configuration of the chosen space," Peden says.

A character drawn on a square grid can change shape drastically when transferred to different gridfields and to different positions within a given gridfield. "I enjoy the fact that my art includes and is inspired by such disciplines as music, literature, philosophy, mathematics, and physics," Peden notes. "I feel the most profound art is that which encompasses all life--at least as much as one can experience within ones limited capacity for knowledge, understanding, and expression." Peden's work helps shed light on the apparent tension between artistic freedom and mathematical constraint. Like many artists, Peden has built a distinctive vision and style out of constraint--by exploring the seemingly unlimited, surprisingly rich possibilities offered by the set of rules that he developed (and freely chose) as the framework for his art. Copyright 2000 by Ivars Peterson

References: Gardner, M. 1988. Anamorphic art. In Time Travel and Other Mathematical Bewilderments. New York: W.H. Freeman. Hunt, J.L., B.G. Nickel, and C. Gigault. 2000. Anamorphic images. American Journal of Physics 68(March):232. Peden, D. D. 2000. Gridfield form and patterning. Second Annual Conference of the International Society of the Arts, Mathematics, and Architecture. Albany, N.Y. June. (Seehttp://math.albany.edu/isama/2000/prog.html.) ______. 1998. Bridges of mathematics, art, and physics. In Bridges: Mathematical Connections in Art, Music, and Science Conference Proceedings, R. Sarhangi, ed. (Seehttp://www.bridgesmathart.org.) Sharp, J. 1998. Problems with Holbein's Ambassadors and the anamorphosis of the skull. In Bridges: Mathematical Connections in Art, Music, and Science Conference Proceedings, R. Sarhangi, ed. (See http://www.bridgesmathart.org.) Walker, J. 1981. Anamorphic pictures: Distorted views from which distortion can be removed. Scientific American 245(July):176.

Trompe Loeil, Anamorphosis and Illusion

Tim Hazell
Trompe loeil (deceiving the eye) and anamorphosis involve projecting an image in ways that challenge our perception. Illusion has formed the basis for scientific and artistic investigation since the Renaissance. Artists such as Rene Magritte and M.C. Escher have long made use of trompe loeil as a fundamental way to make personal statements, challenging us with new interpretations of our environment. Leonardo da Vincis experiments with anamorphosis transcended limits of mechanical perspective and conventional assumptions of geometry. The groundwork was laid for the birth of a more contemporary rationalism as illusion in all its forms became cultural obsession in the 17th and 18th centuries. We delight in visual tricks today. In a carnival gallery of mirrors our reflections are elongated or compressed into comical shapes. Experiments of modern poets, particularly those of the surrealist movement, extend these concepts to great literature. Argentinian master of the short story form,Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), used the allure of mirrors and shifting dreamscapes to evoke a cats mystery and enigma.

To a Cat
Mirrors are not more silent nor the creeping dawn more secretive;

in the moonlight, you are that panther we catch sight of from afar. By the inexplicable workings of a divine law, we look for you in vain; More remote, even, than the Ganges or the setting sun, yours is the solitude, yours the secret. Your haunch allows the lingering caress of my hand. You have accepted, since that long forgotten past, the love of the distrustful hand. You belong to another time. You are lord of a place bounded like a dream.

Confusion mixed with delight at concealment has been irresistible to many cultures. Murals uncovered in the Roman city of Pompei, buried by volcanic ash in 79 A.D., deliberately imply threedimensional space with flat landscape painting. Magrittes famous canvas "The Red Model III" gives boots a whole new meaning. This fusion of workers leather and human toes is both unsettling and tantalizing. Oblique anamorphosis or use of angles and the visual deceit of trompe loeil are closely related. The difference lies in the nature of the trick. Painters use the latter as a device when the observer is standing in a conventional spot. Two objects such as an apple and the portrait of a man wearing a bowler hat may be combined. The result manifests an incongruity that cannot be resolved. Returning to concealment and metamorphosis in verse "Fern Hill" by Welsh bard Dylan Thomastransforms his beloved Wales with juxtaposed imagery. Here is an excerpt:

Fern Hill
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green, The night above the dingle starry, Time let me hail and climb Golden in the heydays of his eyes, And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves Trail with daisies and barley Down the rivers of the windfall light.

Anamorphosis in modern technology has resulted in new developments and techniques of virtual media. Software and multi-sensorial shape modification has brought artificial perspective to web applications. The result is ambiguity in virtual reality. In landscape architecture illusory constructions such as mazes have provided entertainment and deep spiritual experiences since ancient times. Labyrinths and mazes are cousins, although somewhat different. Labyrinths have a well-defined entrance and exit. Various materials, including natural ones such as hedges, are used to

create a well-defined path in which walking is a right-brained activity. Mazes represent an analogical puzzle to be resolved. Their intricate networks of winding walkways contain multiple possibilities for escape, some leading to blind alleys. Herodotus visited the Egyptian Labyrinth in the fifth century B.C. and had this comment: "I found it greater than words could tell, for although the temple at Ephesus and that at Samos are celebrated works, yet all the works and buildings of the Greeks put together would certainly be inferior to this labyrinth as regards labor and expense." Whether we lose ourselves in products of contemporary ingenuity or the experiments of Renaissance artists and scientists, illusion will continue to fascinate us. Id like to close with a crystalline sampling from Dylan Thomas "Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait." She longs among horses and angels, The rainbow-fish bend in her joys, Floated the lost cathedral Chimes of the rocked buoys. Where the anchor rode like a gull Miles over the moonstruck boat A squall of birds bellowed and fell, A cloud blew the rain from its throat..

Trompe l'oeil Tricks: Borges' Baroque Illusionism

Lois Parkinson Zamora University of Houston Artistic devices of spatial illusion were developed in Europe during the seventeenthcenturythe century of the style we now refer to as Baroquein response to cultural anxieties occasioned by revolutionary scientific discoveries, revolutionary religious upheaval, also by the new taste for virtuosic visual display. The authority of perception was being undermined, and Baroque artists responded accordinglyand often fantastically with structures intended to deceive the eyethe literal meaning, of course, of trompe l'oeil. Trompe l'oeil paintings were known long before the Baroque period, and long after, for that matterRen Magritte is our greatest twentieth-century practitioner and, indeed, an artist to whom Jorge Luis Borges has occasionally been compared.
Ren Magritte, "The Human Condition"

Magritte, "The Human Condition"

Magritte, "Key of the Fields"

But my interest here is not in Magritte, but in the self-reflexive devices and perspectival manipulations that are easily recognizable as Baroque.
Andrea Pozzo, "Allegory of the Missionary Work of the Jesuit Order" (1691-94), Church of San Ignacio, Rome,

Examples come in all sizes, shapes and media, but in every instance, whether monumental frescoed ceilingshere, Andrea Pozzo's ceiling in the Church of San Ignacio in Romeor more modest still lifes or domestic scenes such as Raphalle Peale's nineteenth-century, tongue-in-cheek parody of a Baroque theme, entitled "Venus Rising from the SeaA Deception (After the Bath).
Peale, "Venus Rising from the SeaA Deception (After the Bath)"

Trompe l'oeil images share an affective intention of double wonderment: first, to make their viewers wonder "Is this real? and What is real?" and, second, to make us wonder (in the sense of "marvel") at the artist's virtuosity in provoking such questions in the first place. Whereas Renaissance naturalism strove to represent the real by offering viewers the proverbial "transparent window" through which to observe scenes and personages, Baroque illusionism subvertsthis kind of realistic representation by calling attention to its own artifice, to its own perspectival manipulations, and thus to the problematic nature of referentiality as such. Another example of Baroque trompe l'oeil on a grand scale:
Baciccio, "Glory to the Name of Jesus," Church of Ges, Rome

In short, Baroque trompe l'oeil painters challenge the conventions of Renaissance, fixedpoint perspectivewhat is referred to as Albertian perspective, after Leone Battista Alberti, the early Renaissance architect and Humanist who codified these conventions. (It is, of course, the "transparent window" of Albertian realism that Ren Magritte is parodying in his repeated tromope l'oeil windows that we have just seen.) Trompe l'oeil deploys the same conventions of Albertian perspective but to their extreme, manipulating them selfconsciously in order to distort or undermine their own mimetic claims. Central to all trompe l'oeil images, then, is this debate of art with itselfthis spectacle of realism engaged in an assault on its own realistic claims. I will propose that Jorge Luis Borges uses trompe l'oeil devices to similar effect. In his fiction, as in trompe l'oeil paintings, realistic referentiality is deployed and then disrupted; mimetic devices are engaged in their own undoing. But first, a few more visual examples. I have said that Baroque tromple l'oeil comes in all shapes and sizes. Consider the architectural illusionism so favored by Baroque artists. This seventeenth-century nave ceiling fresco by Baciccio in the Ges Church in Rome creates the illusion of infinite extension by belying the real bounds of its actual physical space. It is, instead, an illusory space that aspires to contain the universe and to be co-extensive, furthermore, with the divine. The vanishing point has been removed, as it were, and space is projectedpresumably infinitelybehind the picture plane of architectural surface, angels, and other realistically portrayed foreground elements.
Baldassare Peruzzi, "Sala delle Prospettive," fresco, c. 1515, Villa Farnesina, Rome

Architectural illusionism was known in antiquity and revived in the early fourteenth century, notably by Giotto, but the great vogue begins in the sixteenth century in Italy, and

continues in the seventeenth throughout Europe, when interior walls and ceilings of secular buildings were also frescoed with grand vistas of exterior spaces. This is a flat wall in the Villa Farnesina in Romeare those real doors and benchs? We wonder. And another example in the Pitti Palace in Florence:
Angelo Michele Colonna and Agostino Mitelli, detail from "The Triumph of Alexander the Great," 1638, Palazzo Pitti, Florence

The combination of hyperbolic space and minute attention to pictorial detail again predicts the work of Jorge Luis Borges, for he, too, strives to create the illusion of infinite extension amidst richness of material detail in such stories as "The Aleph," "The Library of Babel," and "Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." His texts, like these painted surfaces, explore not so much what is real and what is not, but rather the multiple (and often deceptive) orders of the real. The aim of this kind of trompe l'oeil, whether textual or visual, is, then, not merely to undermine realistic representation but also to amplify the viewer's or reader's experience of the real by pointing to realms that are impossible to represent realistically. Consider, for example, the Baroque "perspective construction" in Borges' story "The Library of Babel," with its minute description of the vast geometry of the Library, its mathematically measured distances and identical corridors, staircases and towers, each with its exactly numbered shelves, books, pages, lines and letterseven as we are also told that the Library is infinite, immeasurable, unknowable. Here Borges dispenses with the Albertian frame that fixes the distance between viewer and represented space, and instead projects the illusion of infinite space behind the "picture plane" of his realistic description. His narrator describes infinite spatial extension at the same time that he also pays assiduous attention to material detail, not failing to notice "two very small closets": "In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities." (51) Later, he again juxtaposes the "inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian." (52) This hilarious negotiation between infinite space and the functional constraints of real human bodies allows Borges to parody both the mimetic assiduousness and the metaphysical aspirations that underpin Baroque architectural illusionism, while at the same time adopting the paradox upon which their effect depends: the disjunction between the limited space of artistic representation and human selves on the one hand, and the disembodied illusion of infinite extension on the other. Baroque perspectival manipulations, though, are not necessarily vast in intention.
Franciscus Gijsbrechts, "Glass Cupboard door", 1679, Flemish

Cupboards, cabinets and niches filled with a welter of things became staples of Baroque trompe l'oeil painting precisely because they, too, allow the artist to manipulate (and disrupt) Albertian perspective. Here, in a painting entitled "Glass Cupboard Door" by the Flemish painter Franciscus Gijsbrechts, the Albertian vanishing point is truncated by the flat surface of the cupboard door and the back of the cupboard seen partially through the glassa painted plane that appears to coincide with the surface of the canvas itself. Unlike the architectural illusionism that we have just seen, which projects the illusion of infinite space behind the picture plane, here the illusion consists in projecting space in front of the picture plane. The challenge to the painter's skill at mimetic deception is to subvert the picture plane by making something as flat as paper. Detail, Gijsbrechts

appear to protrude into the viewer's space. As we see, the folds and creases in the paper present ample opportunity for perspectival play.
Juan Snchez Cotn, "Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber" (Spain 1602)

Similarly in this still life by Juan Snchez Cotn, entitled "Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber," the picture plane is defined by the wall that frames the recessed larder, but a slice of melon and the end of a cucumber rupture the picture plane, appearing to protrude into the viewer's space. Again, the separation between pictorial space and the viewer's spacethe separation pon which Western realism dependsis undone. Snchez Cotn's vegetables and fruit are not painted images at all, but objects in the viewer's world. I want to pursue a set of trompe l'oeil devices that "rupture the picture plane" of realistic representation in similar ways. If Snchez Cotn's painted objects protrude into the viewer's world in order to disclaim their status as painted objects, the devices I want to show you now do something like the opposite.
Jacobus Biltius, "A Trompe l'Oeil," Dutch, 1678

These objects also pretend to occupy the viewer's space, but they do so but calling attention to the painting as painting, as a two-dimensional artifact, asunreal. They are pictorial detailshere, the nail and the insectsthat are supposedly on the surface of the painting, and thus outside of the represented scene and in the real space of the viewer. Such "outside" details became conventional in Baroque trompe l'oeil painting: a nail that apparently affixes painted objects to a wall, as above; a small piece of paper, apparently pasted onto the surface of the canvas E. Hiernault, "Still Life of the Back of a Painting with a Hebrew Bookplate," 1766

or in this case, on the back of the painting. In fact, the backs of paintings were notinfrequent subjects of Baroque trompe l'oeil painting, because they too undermine the Albertian fiction of painting-as-transparent-window by depicting the painting-as-object an object, here, equally fictional because equally painted, but one that impels the viewer to the double wonderment of which I have spoken: is the object is real? Is it the real back of a real painting, or a painted back of an non-existent painting? And we wonder, too, at the artist's ability to make us wonder. Another conventional trompe l'oeil intrusion is the fly, which sits on the surface of the painting andagainblurs the boundaries between real and represented, because the fly pretends to occupy the space of the viewer rather than the space of the painting.
Studio of Carlo Crivelli, "Saint Catherine of Alexandria," Venetian

Sebastiano del Piombo, "Cardinal Bandinellos Sauli and Three Companions," c. 1516

Curtains are used to similar effect:

Gerrit Dou, "Painter with Pipe and Book," Dutch, c. 1645

Gerard Houckgeest, "The Interior of Saint Gertrude in Bergen op Zoom," c. 1655

to suggest that the painted scene is fictional, but that the curtain, which may be drawn across the painting to protect it from overexposure, is "real" because it exists in the space of the viewer. These "intrusions"or alternative layers of represented "reality"fly, nail, curtainusurp the mimetic claims of the painting by themselves claiming to be real. In like fashion, Jorge Luis Borges blurs the boundaries of represented "realities" in his postscript to "Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," when two objects from the "ideal" world of Tln intrude into the "real" world of the narrator. These objects, a compass and heavy metal cone, are described in his postscript as "...intrusions from this fantastic world into the world of reality." The compass and metal cone are like the flies, the nails, the curtains and cucumbers in the trompe l'oeil paintings we have just seen; they penetrate the normally sealed "picture plane" of narrative realism, confusing the "inside" and "outside" of the realistic frame, causing multiple and contradictory orders of reality to intermingle in ways ordinarily forbidden by the conventional of narrative realism. Similarly in "The Library of Babel," Borges multiplies narrative levels with his footnotes. If, as we have said, the illusory infinity of Borges' Library of Babel, like Baroque architectural illusionism, is projected behind the picture plane of mimetic description, the footnotes to his storysmall print, specific, matter of factare projected in front of the narrative frame into the finite, "real" space of the readeragain, like the flies in trompe l'oeil paintings. Furthermore, one of the footnotes is labeled "editor's note," adding yet another perspective to the textyet another fly, as it wereon the realistic surface of the story. In all of our examples, visual and textual, we encounter this essential irony: the more successful the trompe l'oeil artist is at hiding himselfat pretending that his work is not fictional but realthe more his artistry calls itself to our attention, and the more we are compelled to admire his dexterity as an artist. In this respect, the illusionist bears an uncanny resemblance to the forger, or to God, whose divine miracles are, indeed, often presented in Baroque paintings as trompe l'oeil moments in otherwise realistic contexts.
Jos Jurez, "San Alejo," 17th century Mexican

Carlos Clemente Lpez, "San Juan Nepomuceno," 18th century Mexican

Saints' lives, and particularly martyred saints' lives, are often depicted as realistic narratives interrupted by miraculous glimpses of infinitya structure of co-existing realities that Borges brilliantly ironizes in his story "The Secret Miracle." Recall that Borges' character in "The Secret Miracle" stands before a firing squad in Nazi Germany but is granted a year's reprieve to finish his life's work. At the end of the story, we learn that this reprieve is an illusion, that the year (fully experienced and realistically described) has miraculously transpired in the instant that it took the firing squad's bullets to reach Hladik's body. Hladik prays for time to finish his drama in verse, and is given as much as he needs; his reprieve constitutes a kind of temporal quadratura in which time, rather than space, opens onto infinity. But Borges, not surprisingly, also parodies these conventions. His narrator describes Hladik's text as "incoherent," "a circular delirium" and "a tragicomedy of errors," even as this text provides the motive for the miracle.

Furthermore, the miracle is secret; in saints' lives the two planessacred and secular must eventually intersect, the former radically altering the latter for believers. On the contrary, Hladik's miracle effects no revision of the horrific reality in which it is embedded; there are no consequences, no witnesses or followers, indeed, no completed drama in verse. So Borges parodies the conventions of Baroque hagiography at the same time that he achieves this stunning reversal: Hladik's miracle is no less a miracle for being secret, no less an imaginative transcendence of evil for having had no effect at all on the exercise of evil. But now to conclude: as we have seen, the devices of Baroque illusionism aim to provoke a double wonderment in the viewer and so, too, Borges' techniques of de-realization impel the particular doubleness that pervades so many of his ficciones: the illusion of infinity in a tightly contained narrative space. His architectonic emblems facilitate this irony, for they allow him to condense his vast philosophical speculations in sharply visualized symbolic structures. To Borges' Library, we may add his garden of forking paths and his labyrinths, his mirrors, his Aleph, his sphere of Pascal, his circular ruins, his jaguar's spots: like the Library, they ask the reader to entertain the infinite universe and also its "intimate designs." Vast and virtuosic and yet somehow also vacantthink of the LibraryBorges' trompe l'oeil structures impel the dialectic between abundance and absence, between the longing for plenitude and the experience of emptiness that operates in all Baroque forms of expression to a greater or lesser degree. In Borges' miniature tales of infinity, he constructs spatial illusions that resist the conventions of narrative realism as they continue to operate ironically within them. For, in Borges' stories, as in Baroque trompe l'oeil paintings, the framed space of Albertian perspective has not disappeared but has been ironically included. Which is how Borges' minute mimetic descriptions routinely scorn selfcontainment and open out upon vistas of infinity and eternity.