Going Up and Down a Staircase at the Same Time Quiz

Answer: Mauk

M. C. "Mauk" Escher was born in 1898, the youngest of the five sons of a civil engineer named George Arnold Escher. He spent much of his childhood in the Dutch city of Arnhem where his talent for drawing and carpentry began to emerge - although he struggled with other subjects, including the mathematics that he later used extensively during his career.

A common way of forming nicknames in the Dutch language is to truncate the name and add either a 'k', 'p' or 's' to the results. Therefore Maurits can often become Mauk, Maup or Maus. Alternatively diminutive versions of names are formed by adding a 'je' to part of the name - in this way boys named Cornelis are sometimes known as Ceesje or Keesje.

Mork was an alien played by Robin Williams on the US TV show 'Mork & Mindy'; Morph was an animated clay character produced by Aardman Animations (best known for their 'Wallace and Gromit' films); and Neelix was the Talaxian ship's cook on 'Star Trek: Voyager'.

Answer: Leeuwarden

Leeuwarden is located in the northern Netherlands about 50 kilometres (30 miles) west of Groningen and 110 kilometres (70 miles) north-east of Amsterdam (as the crow flies anyway - there's a lot of water in the way!)

The house in which Escher was born was formerly part of a royal palace that was occupied in the mid-18th century by Marie Louise of Hesse-Kessel, the Dowager Princess of Orange who acted as regent for both her son, William IV, Prince of Orange, and her grandson, William V, Prince of Orange. It was Princess Marie Louise's collection of ceramics that formed the basis of the collection of the Princesshof Ceramics Museum. Following her death in 1765 the palace was split into three houses and it was the central part of the building that became the birthplace of M. C. Escher over 100 years later. Aptly, the museum has also hosted exhibitions of Escher's work.

The incorrect options are the three largest cities in the Netherlands, Leeuwarden is much smaller but does serve as the provincial capital of the States of Friesland.

Answer: Architecture

Between 1919 and 1922, Escher was a student at the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts. He started out attending a course on architecture but swiftly switched (after around only one week) to the subject that better suited his skills and abilities. He was taught by the Jewish graphic artist Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, who later perished at Auschwitz during the Second World War.

Escher's interest in the design and style of buildings and his ability to draw architectural features in painstaking detail can be seen throughout some of his most famous works such as 'Tower of Babel' and 'Still Life and Street'. However, it is probably for the best that he never attempted to build some of the structures depicted in his later works that featured impossible staircases, differing perspectives of gravity and various other paradoxes.

Despite the mathematical nature of much of his artwork, Escher had no significant formal training in mathematics.

Answer: Italy

Escher first travelled to Italy in 1922 and gained artistic inspiration from the various cities and countryside he encountered. He returned a year later and met his wife, Jetta, while staying in the southern Italian town of Ravello. The couple settled near Rome and over the next twelve years many of Escher's works depicted scenes from the Italian countryside. However, the increasing strength of Fascism in Italy in the interwar period led the Escher family to leave the country in 1935 and begin a series of moves across Europe that were influenced by the build-up to, and the outbreak of, the Second World War. They finally moved back to the Netherlands in 1941.

'Castrovalva' and 'The Bridge' are both lithograph prints dating from 1930. The former shows the Italian village of Castrovalva in the Abruzzo region, perched on the top of a steep cliff; the latter depicts a bridge spanning the gap between two sheer cliffs, on one side of which is an unidentified town with Italian-style architecture. 'Atrani, Coast of Amalfi' is another lithograph print, this time from 1931, which depicts the coastal village of Atrani in south-west Italy. Escher later re-used the image in his famous 'Metamorphosis' series of woodcut prints.

Answer: Alhambra

The Alhambra, a Moorish palace and fortress, was home to the Muslim rulers of Granada until they were ousted by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile in 1492. Escher had first visited the Alhambra in 1922, but it was not until he and his wife re-visited it in 1936 and made a large number of sketches of it that it became a major influence on his work.

Although the Alhambra contains many lavish and beautiful decorations, it was the intricate tessellated designs that caught the attention of M. C. Escher and inspired both his interest in the mathematics behind them and many of his later works. In particular, works such as 'Sky and Water' (1938), 'Reptiles' (1943) and his 'Metamorphosis' series rely on the mathematical patterns that he was first introduced to at the Alhambra.

La Sagrada Familia is a church in Barcelona designed by Antonio Gaudi and the Prado Museum is a famous museum of art in Madrid designed by the Spanish neo-classicist architect Juan de Villanueva. The Castle of the Moors was built by the Moors, but is in Portugal.

Answer: Astronomy

Escher was a keen amateur astronomer and a member of the Dutch Association for Meteorology and Astronomy. 'Stars' was just one of a number of his works influenced by things that he would have been able to spot using his telescope - 'Double Planetoid', 'Tetrahedral Planetoid' and 'Another World' are some of the others. Escher is also known to have made observations of binary stars and an asteroid (4444 Escher) was named after him in 1985.

In reality, 'Stars' was probably influenced more by geometry than by astronomy as the stars depicted were created using three inter-locking octahedra - regular solids with eight faces composed of equilateral triangles. The largest of these contains the two chameleons, which aren't exactly heavily associated with astronomy either.

Chalcography is the study of engraving on copper, dendrochronology is the study of tree rings and herpetology is the study of amphibians and reptiles (including chameleons).

Answer: Harold Coxeter, Roger Penrose and George Pólya

Much of M. C. Escher's work is dependent on mathematical concepts - tessellation, perspective, geometry and hyperbolic geometry - and he had considerable contact with a number of prominent mathematicians of his day.

Escher's initial mathematical study included the work of George Pólya on symmetry groups. By the 1950s he had corresponded with the British mathematician Roger Penrose regarding impossible objects and, in particular, his famous pictures featuring impossible stairs. The impossible object known as the 'Penrose Triangle' also formed the basis of Escher's 1961 work 'Waterfalls'. Escher's designs featured in a mathematical paper on symmetry by the mathematician Harold Coxeter in 1957 and Coxeter's ideas on hyperbolic geometry then appeared in some of Escher's later works such as 'Circle Limit'.

Answer: Order of Orange-Nassau

Escher achieved considerable fame as an artist during his life-time. However, he never seemed very keen on the celebrity status he achieved - possibly due to the distraction it caused from his art. However, he did accept his knighthood in the Order of Orange-Nassau in 1955. He did refuse requests from other famous people though - Mick Jagger was refused permission to use one of Escher's works on a Rolling Stones album cover and a request to help Stanley Kubrick with a film (possibly '2001: A Space Odyssey') was also rejected.

The Order of Orange-Nassau is an order of chivalry instituted by Queen Emma of the Netherlands in 1892 for both civilians and military personnel who have earned "special merit" from society. The Order of Leopold is part of the Belgian honours system, the Order of the Garter is the highest order of chivalry in the UK and the Order of the Dannebrog was founded by King Christian V of Denmark.

Answer: A retirement home for artists

After suffering ill-health in the late 1960s, M. C. Escher moved from the town of Baarn to the Rosa Spier Huis in Laren. His destination? A retirement home specifically for artists that had been founded in 1963 by a harpist named Rosa Spier. The idea of the home was to provide a retirement community for older artists where they could still continue to produce works in the studios attached to the various apartments. The gardens at the house were designed by the Dutch landscaper Mien Ruys and other notable residents include the comic strip artist Marten Toonder and the actress Emmy Lopes Dias.

Escher died at the Rosa Spier Huis on March 27th 1972 at the age of 73. He was buried in Baarn, the town where he had spent nearly 30 years of his life.

Answer: Ascending and Descending

'Ascending and Descending', a lithograph print created by M. C. Escher in 1960, features a building whose roof is made up of an impossible staircase. A staircase goes up (or down) each of the four sides of the roof, but connects back to itself in an impossible manner. Just to prove the point two groups of men are depicted, one set climbing the staircases and one set descending them, but they all remain on the roof and don't get any higher or lower overall.

Escher produced several different works featuring impossible staircases in addition to 'Ascending and Descending'. 'House of Stairs' (1951) depicts a structure full of staircases going in all sorts of crazy directions while being climbed or descended by imaginary lizard-like creatures called "wentelteefje"; 'Relativity' shows three impossible staircases defying the laws of gravity; and 'Convex' and 'Concave' has distorted perspective including staircases popping up in particularly odd locations.

'Belvedere' (1958) features an impossible building (although its staircases are fairly normal); 'Drawing Hands' (1948) shows two hands apparently rising out of a piece of paper and occupied in the process of drawing each other; and 'Inside St. Peter's' (1935) is a view of the interior of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.