*** A REAL TREASURE! ***Symmetry - Instruction in Measurement / Octavo
Albrecht Dürer - 1532
1 PDF File 637 MB RS & FF
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), German painter, engraver, and draftsman, was the most celebrated artist of the Northern Renaissance. His reputation spread throughout Europe during his lifetime, beyond his native city of Nuremberg, a thriving center of art and commerce. Like Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer became deeply involved in scientific and mathematical studies. Dürer’s application of scientific principles to the creation of art, especially as recorded in his Underweysung der Messung (Instruction in measurement), marks the beginning of art theory in Northern Europe. This Octavo Edition presents a sammelband (or volume in which multiple works are bound together) of the first two books of Dürer’s Von menschlicher Proportion (Four books of human proportions) in the Latin translation of 1532 (De Symmetria), along with the revised and expanded 1538 second edition of Underweysung der Messung. Other copies of this assemblage are recorded.
English TranslationsDe Symmetria Partium in Rectis Formis
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Humanorum Corporum
Underweysung der Messung
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Book ImagesDe Symmetria / Underweysung der Messung
Underweysung der Messung (1525; revised and expanded, 1538)was the first scientific book Dürer published. It presents a widerange of geometric subjects, as indicated by the original Germantitle: Underweysung der Messung, mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt,in Linien, Ebnen und gantzen Corporen (Instruction in measurement,with a compass and rule, in lines, planes, and solids). Thebasics of linear, plane, and solid geometry often lay a foundationfor descriptions of practical applications for architecture and art,including construction of columns, design of alphabets, and evena model for a bishop’s crosier. The book’s most notable achievement,a topic that found crucial enlargement in the 1538 secondedition, is the analysis of perspective.That edition, reproduced here, is the first complete printing ofDürer’s final version of the study. To the first edition of 1525, it addsseveral corrections, lengthy expansions, and twenty-two new illustrationsdesigned by Dürer. The second edition, for instance,offers an improved calculation of π as 3B/h. Also among the newmaterial is the well-known woodcut of an artist making a pictureof a reclining nude with drastic foreshortening in order to demonstratethe operation of a perspective-grid. To modern eyes, this figureof an artist mechanically drawing a voluptuous nude seemsironic, undercutting the instructional nature of the handbook, ifnot the attitude toward art as technique in general—and it mayhave looked that way to Renaissance eyes as well.
