Stand in front of the mirror and observe your reflection! By turning the wheel at the end of the cylinders holding the mirrors, you can change the image: by turning the wheel you can see yourself in a slimmer or fatter, as well as taller or shorter version, as you wish.
Flat mirror reflectsparallel rays of light parallelly. By changing the surface of the mirror this rule is no longer valid. Concave surface collects, while convex surface disperses parallel rays of light. This is why the image gets distorted.
It was especially popular in Renessaince painting to make anamorphoses. This is the opposite of the phenomenon we are looking at right now: an image that seems chaotic, in the curved (most cases cylinder shaped) mirror gets a meaning.
Mirrors were luxury items in the old times, and people assigned them mystic qualities: they thought mirrors were gates to another world, that can take our soul away.There are often magic mirrors in fairy tales.
