MAGICAL SQUERES

At the request of my friend, the scholar and visual artist Rinus Rolofs, I will attempt to explain the meaning of the magical squares visible in my pictures. Of course, they were all inspired by Albrecht Dürer: the famous Melencolia. In 2014, when Dürer’s engraving turned 500 years old, I drew the accompanying Melencolia commemorative paper. Dürer inscribed the year of creation in the bottom two squares: 15-14; I inscribed my own year in the same place: 20-14. In his work, the sum of the squares’ columns, rows, and diagonals is 34.  I won’t go into why it’s specifically 34 here, because I’ve written about it in detail in my book Selected Conjectures (Válogatott sejtések). For me, this number is 212, which I like because it’s a palindrome. 

With my etching The Drawer, I also wanted to evoke the 4×4 magic square of the *Melencholia* engraving. Here, the sum of the rows and columns is exactly twice 34, that is 68. Dürer inscribed the year of creation in the bottom two squares: 1514; in my work, 2022 appears in the same place. That is when this work was created. 

The magic squares in the 3D image depicting a rhinoceros and an elephant (In memoriam Valentim Fernandes) are a bit more complicated, because here the sum of the columns, rows, and diagonals of one magic square is 1515 (the year Dürer created the Rhinoceros), while in the other, this number is 2026: that is when I created this painting, so it is a recent work.