Droste effect

The Droste effect (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈdrɔstə]), known in art as an example of mise en abyme, is the effect of a picture recursively appearing within itself, in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. This produces a loop which in theory could go on forever, but in practice only continues as far as the image's resolution allows.

The effect is named after

Effect

Origins

The Droste effect is named after the image on the tins and boxes of

The appearance is recursive: the smaller version contains an even smaller version of the picture, and so on.^[4] Only in theory could this go on forever, as fractals do; practically, it continues only as long as the resolution of the picture allows, which is relatively short, since each iteration geometrically reduces the picture's size.^[5][6]

Medieval art

The Droste effect was anticipated by

• 
  The early 14th century Stefaneschi Triptych. In the central panel is the kneeling figure of Cardinal Stefaneschi ...
• 
  ... who is holding the triptych itself.

M. C. Escher

The Dutch artist M. C. Escher made use of the Droste effect in his 1956 lithograph Print Gallery, which portrays a gallery containing a print which depicts the gallery, each time both reduced and rotated, but with a void at the centre of the image. The work has attracted the attention of mathematicians including Hendrik Lenstra. They devised a method of filling in the artwork's central void in an additional application of the Droste effect by successively rotating and shrinking an image of the artwork.^[4][9][10]

Advertising

In the 20th century, the Droste effect was used to market a variety of products. The packaging of Land O'Lakes butter featured a Native American woman holding a package of butter with a picture of herself.^[4] Morton Salt similarly made use of the effect.^[11] The cover of the 1969 vinyl album Ummagumma by Pink Floyd shows the band members sitting in various places, with a picture on the wall showing the same scene, but the order of the band members rotated.^[12] The logo of The Laughing Cow cheese spread brand pictures a cow with earrings. On closer inspection, these are seen to be images of the circular cheese spread package, each bearing the image of the mascot itself.^[4] The Droste effect is a theme in Russell Hoban's children's novel, The Mouse and His Child, appearing in the form of a label on a can of "Bonzo Dog Food" which depicts itself.^[13][14]

• In advertising
• 
  Judge cover,
  19 January 1918
• 
  Liberty cover,
  10 May 1924
• 
  Royal Baking Powder, early 20th century

Comic books

The Droste effect has been a motif for the cover of

The main menu screen for The Stanley Parable (and the re-release The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe), known for its self-referential humor and commentary about video games, shows the protagonist's desk on which a computer monitor displays the same main menu screen. Besides having the expected Droste effect where the computer monitor renders itself recursively, this is a rare example of the Droste effect extending the other direction out of its own medium into the real world, since the player is also presumably sitting behind their desk looking at a computer monitor.

See also

Notes

References

1. ^ "1863–1918 from confectioner to chocolate producer". Droste. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 28 February 2018. Around the year 1900 the illustration of the "nurse" appeared on Droste's cocoa tins. This is most probably invented by the commercial artist Jan (Johannes) Musset [misspelling for Misset], who had been inspired by a pastel of the Swiss painter Jean Etienne Liotard "La serveuse de chocolat", also known as "La belle chocolatière".
2. ^ "Bedenker van Droste-effect bekend", Trouw, 1 August 1994. Note that many sources misspell his last name as Musset.
3. ^ "Droste, altijd welkom". cultuurarchief.nl. Archived from the original on 30 March 2008. Retrieved 18 November 2007.
4. ^ ^{a b c d} Merow, Katharine (2013). "Escher and the Droste Effect". Mathematical Association of America. Archived from the original on 2 August 2013.
5. ISBN 978-90-272-2574-0
   .
6. ISBN 978-1-60962-111-7
   . By putting a picture inside a picture, you get a progression of suggessively smaller, but self-similar images (the box of Droste cocoa has a picture of a woman holding a box of Droste cocoa... ). In theory, this nesting could go on forever into infinite detail, but in practical terms, the resolution of the image limits how it's actually drawn.
7. ^ "Giotto di Bondone and assistants: Stefaneschi triptych". The Vatican. Archived from the original on 30 November 2016. Retrieved 23 June 2008.
8. Courtauld Institute. Archived from the original on 2 November 2013.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link
   ) for examples and opinions on how this effect was used symbolically.
9. ^ de Smit, B.; Lenstra, H. W. (2003). "The Mathematical Structure of Escher's Print Gallery" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 50 (4): 446–451. Archived (PDF) from the original on 16 April 2021. Retrieved 28 April 2021.
10. ^ Lenstra, Hendrik; De Smit, Bart. "Applying mathematics to Escher's Print Gallery". Leiden University. Archived from the original on 14 January 2018. Retrieved 10 November 2015.
11. ISBN 978-1-4422-3481-9. Archived
    from the original on 10 February 2019. Retrieved 17 October 2016.
12. ^ Den Hartog, Ben (11 November 2011). "The Droste effect on Pink Floyd album Ummagumma". OtherFocus. Archived from the original on 24 November 2015. Retrieved 21 September 2015.
13. ^ Kelly, Stuart (31 December 2013). "The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban: moving metaphysics for kids". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 14 November 2017. Retrieved 13 November 2017.
14. ^ "Bonzo Canned Dog Food". Box Vox. 20 November 2013. Archived from the original on 14 November 2017. Retrieved 13 November 2017.
15. ^ Cronin, Brian (15 December 2018). "What Was the First Comic Book 'Infinity Cover'?". Comic Book Resources. Retrieved 19 January 2022.

External links

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Droste effect.

• Escher and the Droste effect
• The Math Behind the Droste Effect (article by Jos Leys summarizing the results of the Leiden study and article)
• Droste Effect with Mathematica
• Droste Effect from Wolfram Demonstrations Project