''Dragon'' ( nl, Draak) is a wood engraving print created by 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 ...

in April 1952, depicting a folded paper

dragon A dragon is a reptilian legendary creature that appears in the folklore of many cultures worldwide. Beliefs about dragons vary considerably through regions, but dragons in western cultures since the High Middle Ages have often been depicted as ...

perched on a pile of crystals. It is part of a sequence of images by Escher depicting objects of ambiguous dimension, including also ''Three Spheres I'', ''Doric Columns'', ''

Drawing Hands ''Drawing Hands'' is a lithograph by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher first printed in January 1948. It depicts a sheet of paper, out of which two hands rise, in the paradoxical act of drawing one another into existence. This is one of the most o ...

'' and '' Print Gallery''. Escher wrote "this dragon is an obstinate beast, and in spite of his two-dimensions he persists in assuming that he has three". Two slits in the paper from which the dragon is folded open up like kirigami, forming holes that make the dragon's two-dimensional nature apparent. His head and neck pokes through one slit, and the tail through the other, with the head biting the tail in the manner of the ouroboros. In ''

Gödel, Escher, Bach ''Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid'', also known as ''GEB'', is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter. By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, t ...

'',

Douglas Hofstadter Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, an ...

interprets the dragon's tail-bite as an image of

self-reference Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philoso ...

, and his inability to become truly three-dimensional as a visual metaphor for a lack of

transcendence Transcendence, transcendent, or transcendental may refer to: Mathematics * Transcendental number, a number that is not the root of any polynomial with rational coefficients * Algebraic element or transcendental element, an element of a field exten ...

, the inability to "jump out of the system". The same image has also been called out in the scientific literature as a warning about what can happen when one attempts to describe four-dimensional

space-time In physics, spacetime is a mathematical model that combines the three-dimensional space, three dimensions of space and one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional manifold. Minkowski diagram, Spacetime diagrams can be used to visualize S ...

using higher dimensions. A copy of this print is in the collections of U.S.

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 National Gallery of Canada.

References

{{M. C. Escher Dragons in art Works by M. C. Escher Woodcuts