Eros as Make-believe: Deceptions of Sights and Anamorphosis in Literature from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century

The essay analyzes the relationships between the fictions of eros and, especially, of adultery, and the “fictional worlds” of literature (Pavel), focusing on the period from late Humanism (Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales) to Shakespeare. The aim is to show how in the adultery scenes – or, in general, through the lens of passions, and mainly in Shakespeare – the rhetorical construction of the images provided by characters either anticipates or crosses the pictorial technique of the anamorphosis, with the effect of suggesting multiple meanings behind the individual apprehension of reality, its subjectivism and relativism (see Hillman 2007).