''Double Planetoid'' is a
wood engraving
Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image or ''matrix'' of images into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and ...
print by the Dutch artist
M. C. Escher
Maurits Cornelis Escher (; 17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints.
Despite wide popular interest, Escher was for most of his life neglected in t ...
, first printed in 1949.
Description
''Double Planetoid'' is printed in four colors from four wood blocks. It depicts a
planetoid
According to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a minor planet is an astronomical object in direct orbit around the Sun that is exclusively classified as neither a planet nor a comet. Before 2006, the IAU officially used the term ''mino ...
in the shape of a
compound of two tetrahedra, interpenetrating each other to form a
stellated octahedron
The stellated octahedron is the only stellation of the octahedron. It is also called the stella octangula (Latin for "eight-pointed star"), a name given to it by Johannes Kepler in 1609, though it was known to earlier geometers. It was depicte ...
. One of the two
tetrahedra
In geometry, a tetrahedron (plural: tetrahedra or tetrahedrons), also known as a triangular pyramid, is a polyhedron composed of four triangular faces, six straight edges, and four vertex corners. The tetrahedron is the simplest of all the o ...
is entirely covered by architecture, while the other is a wilderness populated by
saurian
Sauria is the clade containing the most recent common ancestor of archosaurs (such as crocodilians, dinosaurs, etc.) and lepidosaurs ( lizards and kin), and all its descendants. Since most molecular phylogenies recover turtles as more closel ...
creatures. The planetoid is shown within a circular black field, in diameter.
Themes
''Double Planetoid'' is part of a series of Escher's prints from the 1940s and 1950s that depict small polyhedral planets, also including ''
Gravitation
In physics, gravity () is a fundamental interaction which causes mutual attraction between all things with mass or energy. Gravity is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental interactions, approximately 1038 times weaker than the stron ...
'' (1952) and ''Tetrahedral Planetoid'' (1954), and possibly in the same universe as his print ''
Stars'' (1948). It has thematic connections with other Escher prints from the same period that provide simultaneous views of intermingled worlds, including the more realistic prints ''
Puddle'' (1952) and ''
Three Worlds'' (1955), and is one of many Escher works using the geometry of polyhedra and
polyhedral compound
In geometry, a polyhedral compound is a figure that is composed of several polyhedra sharing a common centre. They are the three-dimensional analogs of polygonal compounds such as the hexagram.
The outer vertices of a compound can be connected ...
s.
Collections
Copies of the print are included in the permanent collections of the
National Gallery of Canada, the US
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...
, and the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...
.
See also
*
Tetrahedral hypothesis
The tetrahedral hypothesis is an obsolete scientific theory attempting to explain the arrangement of the Earth's continents and oceans by referring to the geometry of a tetrahedron. Although it was a historically interesting theory in the late 19th ...
, the discredited scientific theory that the arrangement of the Earth's continents comes from the geometry of a tetrahedron
References
{{M. C. Escher
Works by M. C. Escher
1949 prints