"The Ambassadors" of Hans Holbein, is a good example of how our physical location, the viewpoint from which we "look at" the painting can influence our perception of what is depicted. In this case, the "right" viewpoint reveals the anamorphic skull which is visible from a very acute angle.
Hans Holbein, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve("The Ambassadors"), 1533
"To see this long streak of paint as a projection of a normal death's-head is beyond the power of human perception; furthermore, its spatial environment in the painting supports no such view. John Locke has said of such pictures that they are "not descernible in that state to belong more to the name man, or Caesar, than to the name baboon, or Pompey."
Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception p.260
"Indeed Rennaissance artists ans their successors used this indeterminacy of the view from a sigle station point for the construction of a visual trick of this kind-the so-called anamorphosis, a picture that looks distorted when seen head-on, but which appears to right itself when seen through a peephole from the side. The sideway view results in an illusion, not so much of a reality as of a differently oriented painting which tends to be seen as a hovering phantom."
E.H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye p.191
"A hovering phantom", something that is there and absent at the same time.
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