I learn from the label on the wall that there are six of these perspectyfkas, as they were called in Dutch, remaining in the world, flowers of a minor artistic tradition. In the fifteenth century, Italian artists enthralled with perspective constructed boxes to experiment with the illusion of depth; their projects exemplified the passionate Renaissance marriage of science and art, their love for the mathematics of vision. French and German painters made “peep shows,” shadowbox assemblages of wax figures and objects, theaters behind glass. But the Dutch perspective boxes contained nothing at all, nothing but paint.

This one’s perched on an elaborate black stand, and embellished on its top and sides with decorative motifs: cherubs, implements of the artist’s work. One wall of the box has been left open, covered now with a sheet of Lucite, so that I can peer into the interior: painted walls and floor and ceiling, all representing the interior of a room. Uncurtained windows, open doors, furniture and books, paintings and mirrors, coats hung on a wall rack, a letter dropped on the floor’s geometric tiles: ordinary life.

But something’s strangely wrong. Some things are too large, others tiny, and nearly all seem bent or misshapen, twisted weirdly around corners or across floors and walls. That shape on the floor? A spaniel, his four paws resting firmly on the ground, but above his legs his body stretches wildly up the wall as though he’d been caught in a carnival mirror. The dizzy pattern of the floor tiles spins, as if in the vertigo of the world’s worst case of astigmatism. This is serenity transmogrified, Vermeer on hallucinogens.

But in the two walls which abut the transparent side are peepholes, little lenses like the eyepieces of telescopes. And when I place my eye to those disks of glass—revelation! The painted room suddenly is a room, each thing in place and in perspective. I can see every key on the virginal, the sharp outlines of the dropped letter (addressed to Von Hoogstraten himself, is this his house?), the boots and jacket in their place, the good dog who has been waiting to be seen.

The painter has rendered distortion so exactly that the lens corrects it perfectly; he paints the world misshapen, and the glass shapes it right again. Which means that he has had to misshape things just so, to bend forms so that light through the lens will bend them back again.

Why in the world go to this much trouble? Samuel Von Hoogstraten’s compatriots went to astonishing lengths to capture light transfixing a slice of lemon peel, the touch of sun on the lip of a pewter pitcher. All that struggle to get things right, and then he takes evident pleasure in painstakingly getting them wrong. Or at least seeming to, until the correcting lens reveals to us that his chaos is, in fact, art.