anachronism, (from Greek ana, “back,” and chronos, “time”), neglect or falsification, intentional or not, of chronological relation. It is most frequently found in works of imagination that rest on a historical basis, in which appear details borrowed from a later age; e.g., a clock in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, an attendant to the Pharaoh shod in tennis shoes in Cecil B. deMille’s The Ten Commandments. Anachronisms originate in disregard of the different modes of life and thought that characterize different periods or in ignorance of the facts of history.
Anachronisms abound in the painting of Raphael and the plays of Shakespeare. Artists tended to represent characters in terms of their own nationality and time. The Virgin has been pictured both as an Italian peasant and as a Flemish housewife; Alexander the Great appeared on the French stage down to the time of Voltaire in the full costume of Louis XIV. Modern realism, the progress of archaeological research, and the scientific approach to history came to make an unconscious anachronism an offense. But anachronisms may be introduced deliberately for a burlesque, satiric, or other effect; by contrasting contemporary customs or morals with an alien age, the writer or artist reevaluates the past or present, or both. Thus Mark Twain wrote of a Connecticut Yankee visiting King Arthur’s court, and the Belgian James Ensor painted Christ entering Brussels (1888).