Anamorphic vault (Bramante's Santa Maria presso San Satiro)

Anamorphic art creates "useful lies", even in places of great truth.  Perhaps "lies" is the wrong word; a more positive interpretation is that these illusions can create metaphors of worlds beyond the world we can see and touch.  The example below is just one of many.  The words that follow are a reposting of a small snippet of a longer (and beautiful) post by my colleague, a professor emeritus of Art History at Franklin & Marshall, Tyko Kihlstedt.  

Santa Maria presso San Satiro

Donato Bramante may have had little to do with the basic design of this church, but his training in the new science of illusionistic perspective painting was essential in order to complete Santa Maria presso San Satiro as a properly-functioning church. This is because there is only another three feet of actual space behind the priest whom we see standing at a lectern on the left. The entire choir with its arching barrel vault and receding walls, defined by three arches & pilasters, is not physically real. This choir and all of its architectural elements was painted by Bramante to provide the illusion of real spatial depth.

Nave, Santa Maria presso San Satiro, 1472-1482, Giovanni Antonio Amadeo and Donato Bramante (architects), Milan, Italy

There was, you see, no room for a choir. If you scroll up to the first photograph of San Satiro, you can see the dome and lantern of Santa Maria presso San Satiro poking up behind the older chapel. Where the choir should have been, on our far left, we instead see a road slicing through. A real choir would have needed to occupy the space of this road. The road remains. Bramante simply ‘replaced’ it by painting a powerful Renaissance barrel vault on a flat wall, so creating a major tour-de-force of  illusionistic perspective.

Choir, Santa Maria presso San Satiro, ca.1482 ff, Donato Bramante, Milan, Italy

By the way, those wonderfully expressive terracotta heads in the circular frieze of San Satiro could well be designed by Bramante. They are, most definitely, later 15th-century pieces of sculpture from the hand of a very good artist.