A history of the relationship between art and geometry in the early modern period.
In The Polyhedrists, Noam Andrews unfolds a history of the relationship between art and geometry in early modern Europe, told largely through a collective of ground-breaking artisan-artists (among them, Luca Pacioli, Albrecht Dürer, Wenzel Jamnitzer, and Lorentz Stöer) and by detailed analysis of a rich visual panoply of their work, featuring paintings, prints, decorative arts, cabinetry, and lavishly illustrated treatises. But this is also an art history of the polyhedra themselves, emblems of an evolving artistic intelligence, which include a varied set of geometrical figures—both Platonic, or regular, like the simple tetrahedron, and Archimedean, or irregular, like the complex yet beguiling rhombicosidodecahedron.
Moreover, The Polyhedrists argues that the geometrical depictions of Dürer, Jamnitzer et al. were far more than mere follies from the dawn of perspective, at odds with a contemporary view of the Renaissance, and destined to be superseded by later developments in higher level mathematics. In fact, the evolution of the solids into innumerable “irregular bodies” constituted a sustained moment in the formulation of Renaissance mathematical knowledge and its engagement with materiality. This intense field of experimentation would birth a new language of geometrical abstraction that would ignite a century of novel form-making strategies, ultimately paving the way for developments in geometry and topology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and even prefiguring the more recent digital turn. The book, in this sense, is not just an applied history of geometry, nor a particular geometric reading of early modern art through some of its more celebrated practitioners, but a manifesto of sorts into the hitherto unexplored wilds of art and science.
名人推荐——
2022 年 DAM 建筑图书奖获得者
2022 年瑞士图书奖得主
铜牌,世界上美丽的书籍,2022 年
Celebrity recommendations
Winner of the DAM Architectural Book Award, 2022
Winner of the Most Beautiful Swiss Books, 2022
Bronze Medal, The Most Beautiful Books in the World, 2022
作者简介——
诺姆·安德鲁斯 (Noam Andrews),历史学家和建筑师,比利时根特大学艺术与哲学学院研究员。 他曾在根特大学、纽约大学和建筑协会建筑学院 (AA) 任教,并获得佛兰德斯研究基金会 (FWO)、Villa I Tatti、哈佛大学中心的奖学金 意大利文艺复兴研究中心和马克斯·普朗克科学史研究所。
About the author
Noam Andrews, a historian and architect, is Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at Ghent University, Belgium. He has taught at Ghent University, New York University, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA), and has been the recipient of fellowships from Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
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