ABOUT PALAZZO INVERSO
The apprentice Mauk is an entirely fictional character who takes his nickname and his inspiration from the work of Dutch artist M. C. Escher (1898-1972). As the talented son of a civil engineer, he learned carpentry and developed his gift for drawing before the age of thirteen. As a young man he briefly studied architecture at the Haarlem School for Architecture and Decorative Arts, but with the encouragement of one of his teachers, he soon changed direction to study art and design.
Escher made the right choice. As an artist, he was then free to draw believable–looking buildings that could not be built. Escher’s skill at playing with perspective and tricking people into seeing his version of three–dimensional space made him world famous.
In a work called Ascending and Descending, Escher drew stairs that lead down and around a building’s inner courtyard, yet appear to go back and end where they began. These endless loops going nowhere became his trademark. He was fascinated by stairs and realized that with a few carefully drawn steps he could take a person out of the real world and into his world of the impossible.
"It is impossible for the inhabitants of different worlds to walk or sit or stand on the same floor, because they have differing conceptions of what is horizontal and what is vertical. Yet they may well share the use of the same staircase."
M. C. Escher, 1953
CREATING THE BOOK
Anyone who has read my five picture books about a bear named Henry, beginning with Henry Hikes to Fitchburg (Houghton Mifflin 2000), will understand why I wrote Palazzo Inverso. The book fits perfectly with my desire to bring the ideas of great writers and artists to young children. Just as my bear reenacts Henry David Thoreau's quest to live a simple life, Mauk, as the the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, creates an upside-down world full of surprising impossibilities. I wanted kids to feel the power and exhilaration of... READ MORE»