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 through a collective of groundbreaking artist-artisans (among them, 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 a history of polyhedra themselves, one that charts their progressive estrangement from text-bound instruction in mathematics and philosophy and their subsequent transformation into emblems of virtuosity and bravura. Whether the Platonic tetrahedron or the “irregular” rhombicosidodecahedron, it was polyhedra that came to constitute an iconography of geometrical abundance. The Polyhedrists argues that the geometrical oeuvre of Dürer, Jamnitzer et al consisted of more than perspectival
