Computer-Generated Art: Madonna and Child -- Infinity of Life

The presented fractal image resembles a smooth modern depiction of the Madonna holding a child in her hands. An interesting recursive self-similar pattern is captured here -- both the child in the Madonna's arms and her head are comprised of the very same recursive Madonnas. This can be interpreted as a manifestation of the idea of infinite reproduction of life and knowledge. We discovered the fractal set shown in this picture exactly 25 years ago in April 1991 while working on visualizations of fractals using Pascal language for programming an Intel 286 machine. The first color print of the 800x600 screenshot which was signed and framed in 1991 is currently in the possession of Professor Ivo Petrá. Recently we turned to MATLAB for reconstructing those old computations, and we are providing here the resulting high-resolution image of this meaningfully looking set discovered so long ago. The set is generated in a Mandelbrot-like fashion and is based on the recurrence relationship z_{n} = z_{n-1}^2 + i*conj(c) in a certain rectangular domain in the complex plane. It is worth noting that our recurrence relationship is different from Mandelbrot's.