Nearly 150 years before M. C. Escher was even born, English satirist and social critic William Hogarth was already screwing with our sense of perspective. While Hogarth, like Escher, was interested in the mind-melting mathematics of visual art, the point of his "Satire on Perspective" from 1754 was more about reading comprehension. From Public Domain Review:
These multiple visual tricks are all jokes to convince the viewer of the necessity of reading and understanding Hogarth's friend Joshua Kirby's book, Dr. Brook Taylor's Method of Perspective Made Easy, Both in Theory and Practice for which Hogarth's image acted as frontispiece.
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While the content of Kirby's book takes a straightforward approach, explaining, with illustrations, just how perspective works, the frontispiece introduces Hogarth's characteristic mocking outlook towards the errors of the world. As he captions it, "Whoever makes a Design without the Knowledge of Perspective / will be liable to such Absurdities as are shewn in this Frontispiece".
Here's the full piece—can you spot the 22 known perspective errors?
William Hogarth's Satire on False Perspective (1754) [Public Domain Review]
