English

Party Game for a 500th Anniversary

History and Overview 2014-05-27 v1

Abstract

On the 500th anniversary of Albrecht D\"urer'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.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1405.6481,
  title  = {Party Game for a 500th Anniversary},
  author = {Fumiko Futamura and Marc Frantz and Annalisa Crannell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.6481},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.11 (TeX Live 2010), 11 pages with 7 figures (one two-part)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:23:06.609Z