One day he decided to paint on the walls of his studio everything that was inside the room. It was a large square room with a high ceiling and one window looking onto the street. First he reproduced the window on the wall opposite the window, so that now there was a perfect replica of the window, so realistically done that one could not tell which was the real window. Then he painted the paintings hanging on one wall, all of them self-portraits artfully framed, so that all the paintings of himself also appeared on the opposite wall but flattened into that wall, and yet just as well done and as convincingly as the originals. In one corner of the room a desk was standing against the wall. He painted the desk, and the chair in front of the desk, in the corner of the room directly opposite the real desk and chair. The composition and the perspective were so perfectly executed that if someone had entered the room and decided to sit at one of the desks, that person could not possibly have distinguished the real desk from its reproduction. On the ceiling he painted everything that stood on the floor, the working table, the chair, the paper basket, the easel, and himself too, but upside down of course, and yet so exactly replicated that someone standing on his head looking up at the ceiling could not possibly detect any difference between what stood on the floor and what was painted on the ceiling. Eventually all the objects in the studio were mirrored on the walls and on the ceiling, including the easel in the center of the room with the large canvas propped on it representing the room and the artist standing before the easel in the process of painting a portrait of himself. He then painted himself with a smile of satisfaction on his face standing before the easel in the painting of the easel he had reproduced on the wall. Finally he painted himself sitting at the imaginary desk, his head between his hands, elbows resting on top of the desk. For a while he stared at himself sitting at the imaginary desk, then he walked to the real desk, sat down, placed a large sheet of paper on the desk and began to sketch a picture of himself sitting at the desk sketching himself.

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