AMAD
"Archivum Medii Aevi Digitale - Specialized open access repository for research in the middle ages"To submission
| Title: | The Invention of Infinity: Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance |
| Contributor: | The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives |
| Author: | Reviewed Anthony Phillips J. V. Field |
| Description: | It seems to be a property of human perception that a two-dimensional graphic pattern must be a picture of something. The earliest graphics we know are representations. The picture may be more or less faithful or schematic, on one or the other side of what Gombrich calls “the great divide which runs through the history of art and sets off the few islands of illusionist styles…from the vast ocean of ‘conceptual ’ art ” ([3], p. 9). Since our minds perceive reality as three-dimensional, a basic geometrical problem for the illusionistic tradition is how to render three-dimensional objects and the surrounding space on a two-dimensional surface. J. V. Field’s The Invention of Infinity tells the story of how this problem was discovered as an explicit geometric problem by the artist/mathematicians of the Italian Renaissance, how its solution became part of the standard artistic curriculum, and how its purely mathematical aspects were generalized and developed during the next two hundred years into what we now know as projective geometry. The problem is generally labelled by the term perspective. In its simplest form, “one-point per-Anthony Phillips is professor of mathematics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His e-mail address |
| URI: | https://www.amad.org/jspui/handle/123456789/82208 |
| Other Identifier: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.214.9729 http://www.ams.org/notices/200001/rev-phillips.pdf |
| AMAD ID: | 673405 |
| Appears in Collections: | BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) General history of Europe |
