Influences
Escher's interest in geometry is well known, but he was also an avid amateur astronomer, and in the early 1940s became a member of the Dutch Association for Meteorology and Astronomy. He owned a 6 cm refracting telescope, and recorded several observations of binary stars.
The use of polyhedra to model heavenly bodies can be traced back to Plato, who wrote in Timaeus that the constellations were arranged in the form of a regular dodecahedron. Later, Johannes Kepler theorized that the distribution of distances of the planets from the sun could be explained by the shapes of the five Platonic solids. Escher, also, regularly depicted polyhedra in his artworks relating to astronomy and other worlds.
Escher drew the octahedral compound of Stars in a beveled wire-frame style that was previously used by Leonardo da Vinci in his illustrations for Luca Pacioli's book, De divina proportione.
H. S. M. Coxeter reports that the shape of the central chameleon cage in Stars had previously been described, with a photograph of a model of the same shape, in 1900 by Max Brückner. However, Escher would not have been aware of this reference and Coxeter writes that "It is remarkable that Escher, without any knowledge of algebra or analytic geometry, was able to rediscover this highly symmetrical figure."
Read more about this topic: Stars (M. C. Escher)
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