Get the latest tech news
The Polyhedral Perspective
When geometrical solids took hold of the Renaissance imagination, they promised the quintessence of the third dimension in its pure and unadulterated form. Noam Andrews discovers how polyhedra descended from mathematical treatises to artists’ studios, distilling abstract ideas into objects one could see and touch.
Newe geometrische vnd perspektiuische Inuentiones(1610) by Johannes Faulhaber (1580–1635), a mathematician from Ulm and associate of René Descartes, includes a similar image in which the Platonic solids are clearly depicted as tangible objects hanging from hooks above the door of a workshop where a man is pictured setting out a perspectival drawing of a cube. Eluding definitive analysis as it captures the hermetic spirit of an age in a claustrophobic panoply of symbolic artifacts — the magic square, the starving dog, the bat carrying the engraving’s title, the scattered tools — Melencolia I remains unique by virtue of the sheer density and labyrinthine structure of its self-referential ambiguity. After Dürer, many of the allegorical staples made famous by Melencolia I would remain in iconographic circulation in similar works by Virgil Solis, Abraham Bloemaert, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, and Hans Sebald Beham (1500–1550), whose own Melancholia(1539) is replete with a sphere, workshop tools, and the acquiescent expression on the face of the burly figure as she distractedly toys with a compass.
Or read this on Hacker News