In a much-quoted observation, Francis Bacon notices that ‘there is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’.

In the essay from which this citation is taken, Bacon discusses the way in which painters should compose portraits: ‘by a kind of felicity’, and not ‘by rule’. Proficiency does not make an artist. A successful work of art is marked by striking qualities, striking because of the originality and imagination the artist has employed in selecting its subject and rendering it with artistry, thus presenting the viewer or reader with knowledge, with ‘things unknown’, which would have gone unnoticed without the artist's creation.Originality, imagination and artistry make the distinction between a mere representation and a true work of art, and it is the difference between these two which piques the spectator's curiosity. Of the characteristics of ‘states of being where art… is the norm’, ‘curiosity’ is the first one which is mentioned by Nabokov (LO 315). ‘[W]hy imitation pleases, is,’ writes Hazlitt, ‘because, by exciting curiosity, and inviting a comparison between the object and the representation, it opens a new field of inquiry, and leads the attention to a variety of details and distinctions not perceived before.’ One device to arouse curiosity can be achieved by using an unusual point of view. ‘To a person lying with his face close to the ground on a summer's day, the blades of spear-grass will appear like tall forest trees’, writes Hazlitt. He might have been thinking of The Great Piece of Turf (1503) by Albrecht Dürer in which such towering blades and petioles are depicted, or of Marvell's ‘unfathomable grass’ with its ‘green spires’, which show that an original perspective might serve painter and poet alike. In Bend Sinister, Nabokov chooses an opposite position: ‘[p]hotographed from above, they would have come out in Chinese perspective, doll-like, a little limp but possibly with a hard wooden core under their plausible clothes… and the secret spectator… surely would be amused by the shape of human heads seen from above (BS 147)’.