| In Florence, Italy, a forgotten workshop that belonged to Leonardo da Vinci has been found. The room is complete with 500 year old frescoes by the artist. In addition, there is a secret room that was used by Leonardo da Vinci for dissecting human cadavers. The workshop is part of the Santissima Annunziata convent, a facility that rented out rooms to artists years ago. The inspiration for da Vinci's Mona Lisa likely worshiped at the convent. One of the researchers who found the workshop, Roberto Manescalchi, noted that it was strange that it had taken so long to find the workshop ... but, concluded that simply was how it happened. The proof, he said, was on the walls.
Escher's logic of space:
The lithograph “Exhibition of gravures” can be called a picture, in which the logic of space and its topology are studied. The central portion of space is stretched, while it is bent in a clockwise direction around the unfilled center. The entry is at the right bottom, following the gallery; the reader enters the left bottom corner, in which a youth is standing, who is four times bigger than the first. The young man studies the ship, pictured in gravure, which is moving towards the left; boats, channels and homes are represented on the ship; a woman is looking out of the window, looking at the roof of the gallery, in which the youth is located.
In his works, the artist created optical illusions, mostly with the use of light and shade. For example, in the painting "Cube with Ribbons", it is very difficult to determine, which side the big “buttons”, located on the strip are facing.
In addition, the "Game" with logic space is a picture by Escher, which depicts various "impossible figures"; Escher depicted them separately as well as in lithographs and gravures with subjects, most remarkable among which is probably the lithograph "Waterfall", based on an impossible triangle (Penrose triangle). The waterfall plays the role of a perpetual motion machine and the towers appear to be of the same height, although one of them is one floor less than the adjacent one. Two other gravures by Escher with impossible figures are "Belvedere" and "Ascending and Descending ". All three were created between 1958 and 1961.
Escher worked perspective issues, starting early gravures ("Tower of Babel"); after a decade of its creation, work on perspective was carried out not for the sake of interesting angles but also to create semi-absurd works, allowing us to see the same object from different viewpoints within the scope of a single picture ("Another World II”, “Up and Down"). For example, in the lithograph “Up and Down”, the artist has positioned five "disappearance points" (points, which communicate to the “eye” of a person about the infinity of space).
Self-reproduction and information:
The most comprehensive study of this issue in the artist's creativity was dealt in the book, Douglas Hofstadter's "Göedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid " which was published in 1980 and was awarded with the “Pulitzer Prize”.
The most evident theme of self-reproduction in lithographs, the "Drawing Hands": well-drawn palms, coming out of outlined cuffs; each hand draws the cuff of the adjacent hand. A "strange loop", occurs in which, the levels of drawing and being drawn mutually lock each other.
Hofstadter calls the group of pictures by Escher as "recursive", in which, the "background can be considered as a separate independent figure” and the first image becomes the background of the second image. |
