Perspectiva Corporum Regularium

Perspectiva Corporum Regularium

Jost Amman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Perspective of the Regular Bodies is a lavish compendium of perspectival geometry expressly intended to show off the graphic skills of Jamnitzer, perhaps the most renowned sixteenth-century goldsmith. Based on the five Platonic solids, or "regular bodies"—the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron—the five main sections of the book each consist of twenty-four polyhedral variants. The forms progress from the simplest on the top row of each page to the most augmented and complex at the bottom.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.