I swear this guy couldn't decide if he was making a 6 sided or 8 sided object! The drawing Perspective Study of a Mazzocchio looks like it has a bit of both — i think he's fudging it. And then compare it with the mazzo in the details above on this page and the one on the guys head has gotta be (if symmetrical) 8 sides — unless of course he's got 7 sides — one dropping straight down on the inside.

When i 1st started faking some of jim's apparently hexagonal shapes way back when Phoenix 3D came out of the mac 128k — i couldn't believe it — because there was no way those tubes could be hexaganol and still show that many sides in the view. I proved to james that he was painting octagon and didn't know it. You can bet we had (still have) some discussions about this point. It's one of the reasons i started taking some of his pieces and modeling them from the view he was showing, and then rotating around the scene — just to show him they had to be octagons.

You ask people though, and most of them say, "hexagons."

I got to looking at the mazzocchio on that guys head and started fooling with the object. I discovered that in order to make the lathed 6-sided object that revealed a center space in the orientation shown in the Uccello wireframe — that the hexagon could not be a regular shape. The diagonals have to be twice as long as the verticals. These guys were crafty — as a headpiece, they were employing a distortion in order to telegraph the perspective to a street level observer. Nice tweak!

/mr