Trompe L'oeil

Walk through the Piccadilly Arcade in Birmingham town centre and look up at the ceiling. You'll see a collection of images from the very distinctive art genre 'Trompe L'oeil', which translates as 'Trick of the eye'.

Trompe L'oeil is an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three dimensions
Wikipedia 14th Jan 2011