Archives for the Month of September, 2014

David Wade’s ‘Fantastic Geometry’ – The Works of Wenzel Jamnitzer & Lorenz Stoer

Plate from Geometria et perspectiva [1575] - Lorenz StoerPlate from Geometria et perspectiva [1575] – Lorenz Stoer

David Wade’s ‘Fantastic Geometry – Polyhedra and the Artistic Imagination in the Renaissance’ is a fascinating entrée into the works of group of artists who published books containing enigmatic and fantastical depictions of geometric forms in Germany during the mid-sixteenth century. Densely illustrated publications by Wenzel Jamnitzer, Johannes Lenker and Lorenz Stoer, combine pedagogical instruction on the nature of perspective drawing with idiosyncratic renderings of symmetrical and complex polyhedra. The book explores many of the influences that converged to trigger this ‘movement’, which centered around Nuremberg, and contains many illustrations from the original manuscripts.

Plate from Geometria et perspectiva [1575] - Lorenz StoerPlate from Geometria et perspectiva [1575] – Lorenz Stoer

Plate from Geometria et perspectiva [1575] - Lorenz StoerPlate from Geometria et perspectiva [1575] – Lorenz Stoer

Plate from Geometria et perspectiva [1575] - Lorenz StoerPlate from Geometria et perspectiva [1575] – Lorenz Stoer

Wenzel Jamnitzer, printmaker and inventor of the Perspectograph, equated the five regular platonic solids with the five Greek vowels – this lead him to create meticulous variations of complex polyhedra relating to the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet. His Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] synthesises a metaphorical and symbolic alphabet of complex solids in increasing complexity based on this personalised ideographic system of correspondences.

Plate from Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] - Wenzel JamnitzerPlate from Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] – Wenzel Jamnitzer

Plate from Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] - Wenzel JamnitzerPlate from Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] – Wenzel Jamnitzer

Lorenz Stoer presents a series geometric fantasies in his Geometria et perspectiva [1575] where scenes are composed of architectonic structures strewn in landscapes of ruins and overgrown forests. Wade comments that these apocalyptic landscapes, devoid of people, may bare testament to the era of the plague which would have been in full swing during both Stoer’s and Jamnitzer’s lifetimes – infact Jamnitzer succumbed to the disease in 1585. Both Jamnitzer’s and Stoer’s books were sufficiently popular to be pirated during their lifetimes.

Plate from Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] - Wenzel JamnitzerPlate from Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] – Wenzel Jamnitzer

Plate from Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] - Wenzel JamnitzerPlate from Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] – Wenzel Jamnitzer

Plate from Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] - Wenzel JamnitzerPlate from Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] – Wenzel Jamnitzer

Plate from Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] - Wenzel JamnitzerPlate from Perspectiva Corporum Regularum [1568] – Wenzel Jamnitzer

Perhaps the painter of ‘metaphysical’ landscapes Giorgio de Chirico might have been influenced by Stoer’s work as his scenes also deal with a kind of ‘melancholy of the eternal’ as represented in the imagination by pure mathematical forms and geometric archetypes. In de Chirico’s works people are also conspicuous by their absence, being replaced by draughtsman tools and chalked diagrams. It is hard to tell if the emptiness had just occurred, or if the people have been lost for many years, only leaving behind, in the words of Lautréamont in Maldoror ‘the glittering revelations of eternal axioms and hieroglyphs which existed before the universe and will remain after the universe has passed away’.

Thanks to Rohit Gupta for alerting me to ‘Fantastic Geometry’

Further Reading & Viewing:

Wenzel Jamnitzer’s Perspectiva Corporum Regularum online

Bibliodyssey on the work of Wenzel Jamnitzer (plus a Flickr set of plates)

The Perspective Treatise in Ruins: Lorenz Stoer, Geometria et perspectiva, 1567 – Christopher S. Wood

Lorenz Stoer: Geometria et perspectiva (Colour Scans)

Bibliodyssey on the work of Lorenz Stoer

Related Posts:

John A. Hiigli – Layering the Isotropic Vector Matrix
Primal Generative: Form Constants & Entoptic Geometry