A Dutch cocoa tin gave its name to the picture inside a picture
In 1904 Droste cocoa boxes showed a nurse bearing hot chocolate and a box of Droste cocoa on her tray, which showed the same nurse, carrying the same box, and so on. That endlessly nested image, designed by Jan Misset, now names a whole visual trick.
The Droste effect is a picture that reappears inside itself, in exactly the spot where you would expect a similar picture to be. Each copy holds a smaller copy, so in principle the chain never ends, like a fractal. In practice it stops quickly, because every step shrinks the image geometrically until it dissolves into the limits of print or pixels. Art historians call the device mise en abyme. The cocoa illustration stayed on packaging for decades with small changes, redrawn from 1912 by artists including Adolphe Mouron, and the poet and columnist Nico Scheepmaker spread the term more widely in the late 1970s.
The idea is far older than the tin. Early in the 14th century Giotto painted the Stefaneschi Triptych, whose central panel shows Cardinal Stefaneschi presenting that very triptych to St. Peter. Medieval books sometimes pictured themselves, and some church windows contained tiny copies of the same window.
Advertisers loved it. Land O'Lakes butter showed a woman holding a pack bearing her own picture, Morton Salt used the trick, and The Laughing Cow's mascot wears earrings that turn out to be cheese boxes printed with the cow. Pink Floyd's 1969 album Ummagumma shows the band with a picture on the wall of the same scene, members rearranged. Comic books adopted infinity covers, especially in the 1940s; Little Giant Comics No. 1 in 1938 is said to be the first, and Batman No. 8 followed a few years later.
The most ambitious version is M. C. Escher's 1956 lithograph Print Gallery, in which a man looks at a print of a gallery that contains him, the scene shrinking and twisting as it spirals, with a blank patch at the centre. Mathematicians led by Hendrik Lenstra later worked out the hidden structure and filled that gap by rotating and shrinking the artwork into itself once more.
Source: Droste effect
