Trompe L’Oeil

• Walk northwest down Agrippas from shouk Mahaneh Yehuda (away from the Ben Yehuda Midrahov and towards Binyanei HaUma) just past the point where the street changes its name to Shmuel Baruch. Turn around and look back towards the market.
• Ahead of you, on the left, a trompe l’oeil mural covers the wall of a five- story building. (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/mural.html describes another tompe l'oeil mural.) Along the bottom the painter has made a blue-flowered weed grow. To the right you see a portal in the stone wall, the lion of Judah on its lintel. A vendor displays fish. Another piles fruit on his table. The shouk stretches to imagined Judean Hills.
• On the ground floor of the building is a bakery. I blink. It is part of the mural.
• Far up on the wall, a woman leans, unmoving, over a railing to beat a rug. The pictured rail continues to reality. Around the building’s corner, a woman stands on her balcony. She is as real as the TV antenna on the roof, and she probably has a vacuum cleaner.
• The mural is the work of http://www.cite-creation.fr/ Lyon, France.
• If you come up the street from Sderot Ben Zvi before you see the shouk, you may think the picture more beautiful than the market itself. Though idealized, it is not more lovely.
• Trompe l'oeil fools the eyes but not the nose and ears. Mint, green onions, peaches, and the aroms of Iraqi cooking perfume the real market. People talk in tens of languages, while vendors shout instructions to porters, prices to potential customers, and greetings to old friends. (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/abundance.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/shesek.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/unexpected-february-entertainment.html )

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox