Perception

Lions, Elephants, and the Medieval Imagination

Gianni Sarcone

Lions had already appeared in Roman arenas, where they were set loose to devour Christians. Hannibal famously dragged elephants across the Alps. Yet, strangely enough, very few artists left us reliable images of these exotic beasts from the time.

So, centuries later, European artists faced a minor problem: how do you draw an animal you have never seen?

Simple. You copy someone who also never saw it.

This was the medieval version of the telephone game. A lion might be described in a manuscript, copied from an older drawing, or reported by a traveler as “a huge cat with a mane.” Each artist then copied, misunderstood, embellished, and passed the result on. After enough generations, the lion could acquire a human face, bizarre feet, and the general appearance of a creature that had escaped from someone’s nightmare.

The same problem survived well into the Renaissance. Take Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1515 rhinoceros. Dürer had never seen a rhinoceros. He worked from a written description and a sketch made after a real Indian rhino arrived in Portugal. He added armor-like plates that the animal did not actually have.Yet his rhinoceros became so influential that Europeans kept copying Dürer’s imaginary details for centuries.

There is something wonderfully philosophical about this: we rarely inherit reality itself. We inherit other people’s descriptions of it—and then confidently mistake the copies for the truth.

Details and Attributions for Each Picture

Top Row (Left to Right)

1. Top-Left (Manticore / μαντιχώρας)
Author / Artist: Unknown Medieval/Renaissance Illuminator (Greek manuscript tradition)
Date: Unknown (c. 16th Century / Early Modern Era)
Source / Context: Greek bestiary depicting the legendary Manticore with a lion’s body, human head, and scorpion-like tail.

2. Top-Middle (Elephant and Dragon / “De La Nature Del Olifaunt”)
Author / Artist: Unknown French Illuminator
Date: Unknown (c. 13th–14th Century)
Source / Context: Old French bestiary manuscript (Bestiaire) detailing the natural history and allegorical nature of the elephant and its rival, the dragon.

3. Top-Right (Monkey Riding an Elephant / Text: “aut letanias omnium”)
Author / Artist: Unknown Medieval Illuminator
Date: Unknown (c. 13th–14th Century)
Source / Context: Medieval manuscript marginalia / Book of Hours depicting a caped monkey riding a castle-bearing elephant (Howdah).

Bottom Row (Left to Right)

4. Bottom-Left (Smiling Lion in Floral Border)
Author / Artist: Unknown European Illuminator / Miniature Artist
Date: Unknown (c. 15th Century)
Source / Context: Illuminated manuscript page with ornate floral acanthus border work showing a stylized lion.

5. Bottom-Middle (Trumpet-Trunked Elephant with Trees in Framed Border)
Author / Artist: Unknown English or Northern European Illuminator
Date: Unknown (c. 13th Century)
Source / Context: Latin Bestiary miniature showing a stylized medieval elephant with trumpet-like trunk and tusks.

6. Bottom-Right (Paw-Raising Lion under Fruit Trees)
Author / Artist: Unknown Medieval Illuminator
Date: Unknown (c. 13th–14th Century)
Source / Context: Medieval Bestiary illustration depicting a lion gesturing toward fruit trees.

The Deceptive Oriental Fan

Gianni Sarcone

One of my earliest color illusions, created back in the 1990s, when I was immersed in exploring the physiology of color perception.

Do the pleated sections of the fan really have two different shades of brown?

They don’t. Every pleated “accordion” section is exactly the same brown. Only the thin light and dark bands bordering each fold differ. Those subtle edge contrasts trick your visual system into seeing alternating tones where none exist.

The color is perfectly uniform, but your brain interprets it differently depending on the surrounding contrast—a classic example of simultaneous brightness contrast.

Art as an Open Circuit

Gianni Sarcone

Art is sharing—an offering from the artist to the audience. Every audience calls for its own officiant.

In technological terms, a work of art is an output searching for an input. Without that exchange, it remains only a possibility. It comes into existence through its encounter with another mind, where it can generate emotion, doubt, rejection, or wonder. A work is born once in the artist’s mind, and then again in the mind of the person who experiences it.

The artist is a translator between an inner vision and the outside world. They offer a fragment of themselves, without ever being able to control how that offering will be interpreted. Every audience recognizes the artists who resonate with its own sensibility, its questions, and its time. Every audience calls for its own officiant.

But does an art exist that cannot be shared?

If we define art not as the final object—the painting, the book, the symphony—but as the state of consciousness and the act of creation itself, then that art is fundamentally impossible to communicate. The finished work is only a trace, the imprint of an inner experience that no one else can truly access. What the audience receives is never the act of creation itself, but its remainder: its echo, its shadow, and sometimes even its misunderstanding.

share your art
(To illustrate this point, I’ve added an ironic image circulating on the net. I hope you appreciate the irony—and my sense of humor.)

Topsy-Turvy Illusions from the Past

Gianni Sarcone

“The Lawyer and the Client” (1790), an etching by John Kay, is a clever visual joke—and a rather pointed one about the legal profession.

The Lawyer and the Client - Etching

Look at it one way and you see a smug lawyer. Turn it upside down and the same face becomes a worried client. A simple rotation changes the character completely, showing how appearances—and perhaps even justice—can depend on the point of view.

Below, another of Kay’s reversible caricatures: “Before and After Marriage.”

Before and After Marriage - Etching

John Kay (1742–1826) was a Scottish caricaturist and etcher known for his satirical portraits of Edinburgh society. Topsy-turvy caricatures were popular in the 18th and 19th centuries because they combined visual wit with social criticism, hiding two meanings in a single image.

The Geometry of Wonder

Gianni Sarcone
impossible objects: nested tribars

One of my finest sculptures: nested triangles, the central one in wood, the others in stainless steel…

nested tribars

Just kidding. It’s an impossible tribar composition — a sculpture that can exist only in the eye and the mind.

The Penrose triangle (or Penrose tribar) is generally credited to Roger Penrose, who, together with his father Lionel Penrose, published it in 1958 as an “impossible object.” However, the visual idea of creating paradoxical triangular forms and impossible geometries has older precedents.

Japanese visual culture is often mentioned in discussions of geometric illusion because Edo-period (1603–1868) art, decorative motifs, and craft traditions reveal a deep fascination with complex patterns, ambiguous spaces, and unconventional perspectives. Elements found in traditions such as sankaku mokkō (triangular motifs), karakusa patterns, architectural ornamentation, and woodworking designs show how Japanese artists and craftsmen explored visual structures that challenge perception. While no confirmed direct predecessor of the Penrose tribar has been identified in Japanese art, these examples belong to a broader historical tradition of creating forms that play with geometry and the limits of visual interpretation.

Japanese tribar

A glimpse below into traditional Japanese fabric patterns, where triangular designs reveal how interlaced geometry can create the sensation of impossible structures.

Kagome patterns

To round things off, it’s worth mentioning the Valknut, a Scandinavian symbol dating back to around the 7th century whose interlocking triangles closely resemble the tribar.

valknut

Your Brain vs. Geometry: Rooftop illusion

Gianni Sarcone

Believe it or not, the green and purple rooftops are congruent—identical in shape, size, and angles. What changes is not the geometry, but your perception of it. Perspective, orientation, and contextual cues lead your visual system to interpret the same form as two different structures.

rooftop illusion, related to shepard tables

This effect is closely related to Shepard’s tabletop illusion and earlier studies in which identical parallelograms (A and B), when rotated (and superimposed), are perceived as different shapes, as the brain prioritizes interpretation over measurement.

Since some still insist these roofs are not congruent, I’ve put together a short animation that shows otherwise.

animated rooftop illusion

Bear-ly Seal

Gianni Sarcone

People often ask where my ideas come from. There is no single answer. They tend to surface quietly, shaped by places I’ve seen and cultures I’ve crossed.

“Seal or Bear?” grew out of that kind of moment. An animal suspended in the vastness of a frozen world—emerging from an ice hole, yet refusing to settle into a single identity. Is it a polar bear? A seal? Or something that holds both readings at once?

Bear of seal?

The idea came to me while traveling through northern Canada, surrounded by the stillness of Arctic landscapes and the deep presence of Inuit traditions. That silence has a way of sharpening perception—of making ambiguity feel natural rather than puzzling.

First created in the 1990s, the illusion went on to become a reference point in visual perception studies and later found its way into textbooks.

More recently, the “Seal or Bear?” illusion will be featured by the NHK Educational Corporation as part of a 2026–2027 educational series on psychology and visual perception.

The Borromean Tribar

Gianni Sarcone

This form belongs to the family of impossible figures, more specifically to the Penrose triangle, or tribar.

impossible figure

At first glance, it looks entirely manufacturable. The structure appears to be made from three identical square rings (Fig. 1), each pierced by a circular opening and arranged in three mutually perpendicular planes (Fig. 2). Together, they seem to interlock seamlessly, forming an impossible three-dimensional tribar that evokes a trefoil knot and its endless over-under weaving.

If this sculpture looks physically realizable to you, congratulations: your visual system has just accepted a geometric impossibility.

the making of the borromean tribar

Could such an object be built? Not exactly. One solution would be to twist one of the junctions slightly, but that trick would be immediately noticeable here because some of the angles would no longer appear perfectly square (90°), as shown in the picture below. Another possibility would be to leave a small gap at one junction and view the sculpture from a carefully chosen angle, allowing perspective to hide the discontinuity.

This is how a real 3D Borromean Tribar would appear…

The Eternal Return

Gianni Sarcone

At times, I find myself resembling the shipwrecked man from The Invention of Morel, stranded on an island that at first appears deserted, almost welcoming in its deceptive silence. Yet something soon shifts. The people who inhabit it do not see him. He moves among them like a breath, a weightless trace, already slipping out of reality.

Gradually, he understands that his invisibility is not accidental. These bodies, these gestures, this frozen summer light… all obey another logic. A repetition. A projection. Life here has become mechanical memory, the reconstruction of vanished moments, orchestrated by a machine born of obsession.

And in the face of this unsettling truth, a decisive turn emerges: remain outside, intact and separate, or step into the image, accept dissolution within the cycle at the cost of one’s own substance.

The story leaves behind an unnameable imprint—a nostalgia without object, as if something within us recognized a scene already lived elsewhere. It opens a fissure in what we call reality: its fragility, its occasional nature as stable illusion, and the strange condition of the individual who must vanish in order to fully belong to what he contemplates.

A film worth seeking out, or even better, the novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares on which it is based—brief in form, but long-lasting in its quiet afterlife within memory.

l'invenzione di Morel
Immortality, Love & Loneliness
the island
The island as described by Adolfo Bioy Casares