2014/05/26 by Fumiko Futamura, Futamura, Fumiko, Marc Frantz +3
Arts and Humanities · Mathematics · #51N05 (Secondary) #51N15 (Primary) #Architecture and Art History Studies #Cultural Heritage Materials Analysis #FOS: Mathematics #History and Overview (math.HO) #History and Theory of Mathematics #math.HO #msc:51N05 #msc:51N15
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1405.6481
pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.11 (TeX Live 2010), 11 pages with 7 figures (one two-part)
arxiv created 2014/05/26 · openalex publication_date 2014/05/26 · arxiv updated 2014/05/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
On the 500th anniversary of Albrecht Dürer's copperplate engraving Melencolia I, we invite readers to join in a time-honored "party game" that has attracted art historians and scientists for many years: guessing the nature and meaning of the composition's enigmatic stone polyhedron. Our main purpose is to demonstrate the usefulness of the cross ratio in the analysis of works in perspective. We show how the cross ratio works as a projectively invariant "shape parameter" of the polyhedron, and how it can be used in analyzing various theories of this figure.