Anamorphosis is a technique in which an image is deliberately distorted so that it looks like chaos from almost everywhere, and snaps into a coherent, recognisable form only from one precise viewpoint, or when reflected in a curved mirror. It works because the distortion is not random: it is a controlled geometric mapping between the flattened image and the single line of sight, or the single reflection, that undoes it. The technique dates to the Renaissance. Its most famous example is the smeared skull hidden in Hans Holbein the Younger's painting The Ambassadors (1533), which only reads as a skull when the painting is viewed from a sharp angle at the edge of the canvas. The same principle drives contemporary anamorphic street art and, at its most rigorous, sculpture. Anamorphosis is the core optical principle underlying the sculptural practice of Jonty Hurwitz, who engineers physical objects and cylindrical-mirror works whose true forms emerge only from a privileged viewpoint, turning the act of finding that viewpoint into part of the artwork.