Perspectiva corporum regularium (from Latin: Perspective of the Regular Solids) is a book of perspective drawings of polyhedra by German Renaissance goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer, with engravings by Jost Amman, published in 1568. [1]
Despite its Latin title, Perspectiva corporum regularium is written mainly in the German language. It was "the most lavish of the perspective books published in Germany in the late sixteenth century" and was included in several royal art collections. [2] It may have been the first work to depict chiral icosahedral symmetry. [3]
The book focuses on the five Platonic solids, with the subtitles of its title page citing Plato's Timaeus and Euclid's Elements for their history. Each of these five shapes has a chapter, whose title page relates the connection of its polyhedron to the classical elements in medieval cosmology: fire for the tetrahedron, earth for the cube, air for the octahedron, and water for the icosahedron, with the dodecahedron representing the heavens, its 12 faces corresponding to the 12 symbols of the zodiac. [1] [2] Each chapter includes four engravings of polyhedra, each showing six variations of the shape including some of their stellations and truncations, for a total of 120 polyhedra. [1] This great amount of variation, some of which obscures the original Platonic form of each polyhedron, demonstrates the theory of the time that all the variation seen in the physical world comes from the combination of these basic elements. [4]
Following these chapters, additional engravings depict additional polyhedral forms, including polyhedral compounds such as the stella octangula, [1] polyhedral variations of spheres and cones, [5] and outlined skeletons of polyhedra following those drawn by Leonardo da Vinci for Luca Pacioli's earlier book Divina proportione . [2] [6] In this part of the book, the shapes are arranged in a three-dimensional setting and often placed on smaller polyhedral pedestals. [4]
The roughly 50 engravings for the book were made by Jost Amman, a German woodcut artist, based on drawings by Jamnitzer. [2] [4] [7] As Jamnitzer describes in his prologue, he built models of polyhedra out of paper and wood and used a mechanical device to help trace their perspective. This process was depicted in another engraving by Amman from around 1565, showing Jamnitzer at work on his drawings. Amman included this engraving in another book, Das Ständebuch (1658). [8]
A later work on perspective, Artes Excelençias de la Perspectiba (1688) by P. Gómez de Alcuña, was heavily influenced by Jamnitzer. [8]
A 2008 German postage stamp, issued to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Jamnitzer's birth, included a reproduction of one of the pages of the book, depicting two polyhedral cones tilted towards each other. The full sheet of ten stamps also includes another figure from the book, a skeletal icosahedron. [5]
A French edition of Perspectiva corporum regularium, edited by Albert Flocon, was published by Brieux in 1964. Gutenberg Reprints republished it both in the original German and in the French edition in 1981. [9] A Spanish translation of Perspectiva corporum regularium was published in 2006. [6]
In geometry, a Kepler–Poinsot polyhedron is any of four regular star polyhedra.
In geometry, a polyhedron is a three-dimensional shape with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices.
In geometry, a Platonic solid is a convex, regular polyhedron in three-dimensional Euclidean space. Being a regular polyhedron means that the faces are congruent regular polygons, and the same number of faces meet at each vertex. There are only five such polyhedra:
In geometry, the truncated icosahedron is an Archimedean solid, one of 13 convex isogonal nonprismatic solids whose 32 faces are two or more types of regular polygons. It is the only one of these shapes that does not contain triangles or squares. In general usage, the degree of truncation is assumed to be uniform unless specified.
In geometry, stellation is the process of extending a polygon in two dimensions, polyhedron in three dimensions, or, in general, a polytope in n dimensions to form a new figure. Starting with an original figure, the process extends specific elements such as its edges or face planes, usually in a symmetrical way, until they meet each other again to form the closed boundary of a new figure. The new figure is a stellation of the original. The word stellation comes from the Latin stellātus, "starred", which in turn comes from Latin stella, "star". Stellation is the reciprocal or dual process to faceting.
A regular polyhedron is a polyhedron whose symmetry group acts transitively on its flags. A regular polyhedron is highly symmetrical, being all of edge-transitive, vertex-transitive and face-transitive. In classical contexts, many different equivalent definitions are used; a common one is that the faces are congruent regular polygons which are assembled in the same way around each vertex.
In geometry, the triakis icosahedron is an Archimedean dual solid, or a Catalan solid, with 60 isosceles triangle faces. Its dual is the truncated dodecahedron. It has also been called the kisicosahedron. It was first depicted, in a non-convex form with equilateral triangle faces, by Leonardo da Vinci in Luca Pacioli's Divina proportione, where it was named the icosahedron elevatum. The capsid of the Hepatitis A virus has the shape of a triakis icosahedron.
Stars is a wood engraving print created by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher in 1948, depicting two chameleons in a polyhedral cage floating through space.
Jost Amman was a Swiss-German artist, celebrated chiefly for his woodcuts, done mainly for book illustrations.
In geometry, a uniform polyhedron has regular polygons as faces and is vertex-transitive. It follows that all vertices are congruent.
Wenzel Jamnitzer was a Northern Mannerist goldsmith, artist, and printmaker in etching, who worked in Nuremberg. He was the best known German goldsmith of his era, and court goldsmith to a succession of Holy Roman Emperors.
In geometry, the great dodecahedron is a Kepler–Poinsot polyhedron, with Schläfli symbol {5,5/2} and Coxeter–Dynkin diagram of . It is one of four nonconvex regular polyhedra. It is composed of 12 pentagonal faces, intersecting each other making a pentagrammic path, with five pentagons meeting at each vertex.
In geometry, the complete or final stellation of the icosahedron is the outermost stellation of the icosahedron, and is "complete" and "final" because it includes all of the cells in the icosahedron's stellation diagram. That is, every three intersecting face planes of the icosahedral core intersect either on a vertex of this polyhedron, or inside of it.
A regular dodecahedron or pentagonal dodecahedron is a dodecahedron that is regular, which is composed of 12 regular pentagonal faces, three meeting at each vertex. It is one of the five Platonic solids. It has 12 faces, 20 vertices, 30 edges, and 160 diagonals. It is represented by the Schläfli symbol {5,3}.
Cauchy's theorem is a theorem in geometry, named after Augustin Cauchy. It states that convex polytopes in three dimensions with congruent corresponding faces must be congruent to each other. That is, any polyhedral net formed by unfolding the faces of the polyhedron onto a flat surface, together with gluing instructions describing which faces should be connected to each other, uniquely determines the shape of the original polyhedron. For instance, if six squares are connected in the pattern of a cube, then they must form a cube: there is no convex polyhedron with six square faces connected in the same way that does not have the same shape.
In geometry, faceting is the process of removing parts of a polygon, polyhedron or polytope, without creating any new vertices.
Polyhedra is a book on polyhedra, by Peter T. Cromwell. It was published by in 1997 by the Cambridge University Press, with an unrevised paperback edition in 1999.
Adventures Among the Toroids: A study of orientable polyhedra with regular faces is a book on toroidal polyhedra that have regular polygons as their faces. It was written, hand-lettered, and illustrated by mathematician Bonnie Stewart, and self-published under the imprint "Number One Tall Search Book" in 1970. Stewart put out a second edition, again hand-lettered and self-published, in 1980. Although out of print, the Basic Library List Committee of the Mathematical Association of America has recommended its inclusion in undergraduate mathematics libraries.
De quinque corporibus regularibus is a book on the geometry of polyhedra written in the 1480s or early 1490s by Italian painter and mathematician Piero della Francesca. It is a manuscript, in the Latin language; its title means [the little book] on the five regular solids. It is one of three books known to have been written by della Francesca.
A polyhedral map projection is a map projection based on a spherical polyhedron. Typically, the polyhedron is overlaid on the globe, and each face of the polyhedron is transformed to a polygon or other shape in the plane. The best-known polyhedral map projection is Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map. When the spherical polyhedron faces are transformed to the faces of an ordinary polyhedron instead of laid flat in a plane, the result is a polyhedral globe.