Fool-the-eye tabletop with prints and book

A trompe-l'oeil tabletop of "wood" veneer covered with scattered "printed" sheets from newspapers and books, as well as several Renaissance prints, including works by Albrecht Dürer. The texts at top left are a "page" from what appears to be an early 16th-century French Bible with the beginning of Genesis in the Vulgate; an unidentified Hebrew text; and the first page of the 1640 Leiden edition of Achilles Tatius's 2nd-century-AD Greek romance, "Leucippe and Clitophon."

William Sturgis Bigelow Collection