The Polyhedrists, Art and Geometry in the long sixteenth century

304 Pages·2022·36.057 MB·English

by  Noam Andrews

THE POLYHEDRISTS NOAM ANDREWS
The Prtvhairtsts unfolds a history of geometry in sixteenth-century
Europe, told through detailed analysis of a rich visual panoply of
ground-breaking work by Luca Pacioli, Albrecht Dürer. Wenzel
Jammtzer. Lorentz Stoor, and others. Beginning with the practical
u1111ty of the Platonic solids for learning perspectiv.il measurement
and mo\ mg into the realm of painting, print culture, drawing, and
the decorative arts, the book argues tor the primacy of a geomet­
ric model as explicit artistic subject. More than marginal curios­
ities from the dawn of perspective, at odds with our image of the
Renaissance and destined to be superseded by later developments in
the exact sciences, this intense held of experimentation would birth
a new language of abstraction, ignite a century of novel form-making
strategics that prefigured the digital turn, and ultimately pave the
way for developments in geometry and topology in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.The book is not just an applied history
of geometry, nor a particular geometric reading of art, but opens a
new vista into the hitherto unexplored wilds of art and science.
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THE MIT PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, England
THE POLYHEDRISTS
ART AND GEOMETRY IN THE LONG
SIXTEENTH CENTURY
NOAM ANDREWS

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