Art’s infinity and beyond
QUESTION Is there a term to describe an image that contains a repeatedly smaller version of itself?
In THE art world, a picture containing a picture of itself is known as the Droste effect. It takes its name from a 1904 advertising campaign.
Dutch chocolate manufacturer Droste used an illustration on a tin of its cocoa of a nurse holding a tray with a cup of hot cocoa, which had the same image within repeated ad infinitum.
It was the work of commercial artist Jan (Johannes) Musset.
The effect is not a recent idea. The Stefaneschi altarpiece is a triptych completed in 1320 by Giotto for the Old St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
The centre panel has St Peter on the front and Christ on the back. Cardinal Giacomo Gaetani Stefaneschi, who commissioned the artwork, is portrayed kneeling on both sides of the centre panel. On the front he is offering an image of the triptych to St Peter.
The Surrealists often used the Droste effect. A famous example is 1940’s The Face Of War by Salvador Dali, which depicts a withered head with the same image in the eye sockets and mouth.
In 1956, the Droste effect was seen in a mind-bending lithograph called Pr en ten ten to ons telling, also known as Print Gallery, by Maurits Cornelis Escher.
It portrays a young man who is looking at an image of the same gallery in which he is standing.
The concept also appears in literature. The term mise en abyme, meaning placed into the abyss, comes from heraldry where it describes the image of a shield placed within a larger one. The term was borrowed by nobel prize-winning French author Andre Gide to describe the Droste effect.
The example he used was William Shakespeare’s use of the play within a play in Hamlet, where a theatrical company presents a performance for the characters that illuminates a thematic aspect of the main drama.
Recursion is the term used in computer science to solve complex questions by breaking them down into simpler iterations of the larger problem.
In physics, interesting observations can be made if two plane (flat) mirrors are placed together on one of their edges. As the angle between them is decreased, the number of images increases. As it approaches 0 degrees (the mirrors are parallel to each other), the number of images approaches infinity.
S. D. Lowe, Lincoln.
QUESTION In The Beatles’ track Get Back, does JoJo refer to Linda McCartney’s first husband?
PAUL MCCARTNEY has denied linda’s first husband Joseph Melville See Jr was JoJo, claiming: ‘I had no particular person in mind, it was a fictional character, halfman, half-woman, all very ambiguous.’
The fact that linda and Joseph married in Tucson and that he was something of an adventurer might suggest otherwise, as the lyric goes: JoJo was a man who thought he
was a loner But he knew it couldn’t last JoJo left his home in Tucson, Arizona For some California grass.
Joseph was born on April 19, 1938, in Albany, new york. His father died when he was young, but served as a model for a life of adventure. He had joined lafayette Escadrille, a French air force unit made up of Americans, in World War I.
Joseph attended the exclusive Riverdale school and graduated from Princeton in 1960 with a degree in geology. He also studied at the universities of new Mexico and Arizona.
He met linda Eastman who was majoring in fine arts at Arizona and they married in 1962 and had a daughter, Heather. The couple divorced in 1965 after Joseph had taken a year-long job in Africa in the expectation that linda would raise their daughter while he was away.
She had other ideas and went on to become a professional photographer, chronicling the musical revolution of the 1960s. She met Paul McCartney at Soho’s Bag O’ nails club in 1967 and they married two years later. Soon after, Heather was adopted by McCartney.
When journalist Brian Jabas Smith directly asked Joseph ‘Were you really JoJo from The Beatles’ song Get Back?’ he testily replied: ‘I don’t want to talk about that s***.’
He never remarried. As an exploration geologist, he assessed the economic potential of long-abandoned mines, especially in South America.
In the 1980s, he made films of the Huichol, Seri, Tarahumara and Tepehuan tribes in Mexico and the Tuareg in north Africa.
He died on March 19, 2000, in Tucson of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, a month before his 62nd birthday.
Michael Lennon, Lytham St Annes, Lancs.
QUESTION Have any actors’ careers been destroyed by typecasting?
CHILD stars often struggle to establish an adult film career.
Macaulay Culkin was launched and ruined by his portrayal of Kevin McCallister in 1990’s Home Alone.
The rest of his career seems to be him attempting to break out of the cute kid mould. In 1993’s The Good Son, he played a psychopathic child killer with an angel face.
Elijah Wood, who also appeared in The Good Son, is for ever associated with the character of Frodo Baggins.
Wood tried to break away in 2005 by playing serial killer Kevin in Sin City and a football hooligan in Green Street, but we all know he’s a furry-footed Hobbit.
As luke and leia Skywalker, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher’s careers pretty much started and ended with Star Wars.
Haley Joel Osment’s roles in The Sixth Sense and A.I. Artificial Intelligence are so memorable that they set him up to fail in any other part.
Helen Woodward, Shrewsbury, Shropshire. IS THERE a question to which you want to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question here? Write to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT; or email charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection is published, but we’re unable to enter into individual correspondence.