* An early and perhaps apocryphal example of trompe l’oeil, reported by Pliny the Elder, is the legendary competition between two renowned painters in ancient Greece, Zeuxis and Parrhasios. Each artist brought a covered painting to the contest. When Zeuxis unveiled his work, his painted grapes were so realistic that birds flew from the sky to peck at them. Convinced of his victory, Zeuxis tried to uncover Parrhasios’s painting to confirm the superiority of his work. He was defeated, however, because the curtain he tried to pull back was Parrhasios’s painting itself.