In this lithograph, Escher uses two-dimensional images to depict objects free of the confines of the three-dimensional world.

He appears to be constructing it from a diagram of a Necker cube at his feet, with the intersecting lines circled.

The woman about to climb the steps of the building is modeled after a figure from the right-hand panel of Hieronymus Bosch's 1500 triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights.

[1] The ridge in the background is part of the Morrone Mountains in Abruzzo, that Escher had visited several times when living in Italy during the 1920s and 1930s.

In 2012, Prof. Gershon Elber of Israel's Technion University, using specially designed CAD software and a 3D printer, created a 3D model of Belvedere and other impossible Escher structures, viewable only from one angle.