‘Only a bungler.” That was what the mathematicians thought of MC Escher. As for the artists, they found him irritating. “I am plagued from time to time,” Escher wrote, “with an immense feeling of inferiority.”

Maurits Cornelis Escher may have felt small but the worlds he created were infinite. In his prints, patterns repeat into eternity, snakes bite their own tails and night turns to day turns to night turns to day. The Tower of Babel rises tier upon tier. Weary walkers trudge, trudge, trudge a lonely, never-ending round up stairs that lead only to more stairs. A hand draws its partner drawing its partner. A lithographic lizard crawls out of the page and becomes briefly a real, live, steam-snorting lizard, before sinking back again