Mise en abyme

Mise en abyme (French pronunciation: ​[miz‿ɑ̃n‿abim]; also mise en abîme) is a French term derived from heraldry, and literally means "placed into abyss". The term has developed a number of particular senses in modern criticism since it was picked up from heraldry by the French author André Gide.

A common sense of the phrase is the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, then seeing as a result an infinite reproduction of one's image. Another is the Droste effect, in which a picture appears within itself, in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. That is named after the 1904 Droste cocoa package, which depicts a woman holding a tray bearing a Droste cocoa package, which bears a smaller version of her image. The phrase has several other meanings, however, in the realms of the creative arts and literary theory. In Western art history, "mise en abyme" is a formal technique in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself, in a sequence appearing to recur infinitely; "recursive" is another term for this.

In the terminology of heraldry, the abyme is the center of a coat of arms. The term "mise en abyme" then meant put in the center. It described a coat of arms that appears as a smaller shield in the center of a larger one (see Droste effect).

A complex example of mise en abyme is seen in the coat of arms of the United Kingdom for the period 1816–1837, as used by King George III. The crown of Charlemagne is placed en abyme within the escutcheon of Hanover, which in turn is en abyme within the arms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

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