Trompe l’oeil with an engraving of Saint Peter Elias Mögel

Trompe-l’œil, or deceptive paintings, are designed to intentionally and playfully trick the viewer’s eyes. They create a momentary illusion, as if the depicted objects were not in the painting but in three-dimensional space, within arm’s reach of the viewer. The only artist known for this genre in the Hungarian territories was Elias Mögel, born in Switzerland and active in Pozsony (today Bratislava, Slovakia). The picture depicting an engraving of Christ belongs to a series, from which we also know a painting of Saint Peter and another of Saint Thaddeus the Apostle. These three pictures were modelled on Marco Alvise Pitteri’s etchings, which were based on compositions by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. In the individual works in the series of engravings, just like in Mögel’s trompe-l’œil paintings, the saints appear with their attributes. By creating the illusion of an engraving pinned onto a wooden board, Mögel evokes the technique of the series he used as his model.