Decoding William Scrots' anamorphic portrait of Edward VI

Abstract

We have been studying the geometry of anamorphic art which is a particular form of perspective where the picture has to be viewed from a special point in order to make sense of the image. Part of this work has been developing methods for resolving such images using a computer. In our work on one of the most famous anamorphic images, William Scrots’ 1546 portrait of Edward VI, the mathematics has been quite challenging. The results show that Scrots’ mastery of geometry was superb, and we make some suggestions as to how he might have constructed the painting especially the ellipses.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Professor B G Nickel for his generous interest in this research without which it would be much poorer. Their thanks to Sigrid Kohlmann of the library of the University of Erlangen and Dr Christian Ucke for help in obtaining the anamorphosis of the hand by Master HR and also to Georg Füsslin (1999) for Figure 4.