:: DÜRER · PRAEFATIO ::
Underweysung der Messung
Albrecht Dürer · instruction in measurement with compass and straightedge · Nuremberg, 1525 · the Peltzer edition, 1908
Take a cube and slit it open along its edges, then press it flat. What you get is a paper cross of six squares you could scissor out and fold back into the solid. That little diagram is a net, and Dürer invented it on these very pages. It is the whole book in one image: a painter deciding that beauty is not a gift but a construction, that the perfect letter, the true column, the foreshortened cube can all be reached, by anyone, with two tools, a compass and a straightedge. In 1525 Albrecht Dürer set that conviction down in German rather than Latin, the first serious geometry written for the workshop instead of the university, and called it the Underweysung der Messung, the Instruction in Measurement. Across four books he draws the spiral and the conic section, lays out the regular polygons and the tilings that lock the plane, constructs the Roman and the blackletter alphabets stroke by measured stroke, unfolds the five Platonic solids into those flat nets, and ends at the machines, the strange, beautiful apparatus for catching three dimensions on two. It is the moment the artist's eye and the geometer's hand become a single instrument. Compass in one hand, straightedge in the other; the rest is patience.
Before the book is opened, let the terms be plain.
This room keeps no till: nothing here is sold, and never will be. It is set down for one reason, the dissemination of knowledge and the plain love of the game.
Dürer printed the Underweysung in Nuremberg, 1525, and dedicated it to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer; the woodcuts are his own. The setting here is Alfred Peltzer's 1908 edition, which carries Dürer's German into modern spelling, reproduces his figures, and opens with a foreword by the painter Hans Thoma, gently abridged and faithfully kept. Its leaves are now given a parallel reading edition: Peltzer's page on the left, a fresh English translation on the right — carried over here from his German — with Dürer's own words a click away, and a four-book index threaded through. My part in this is small. The geometry was Dürer's, the rescue was Peltzer's, the scan was a librarian's; mine was only to set it whole and carry the German into English. But it is the part I can give away, so I do. Read it freely, carry it wherever you like, only never sell it. Who taught you that a cube has six faces, and did anyone ever hand you the paper one to fold?
Provenance & Thanks
- The work
- Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt. Nuremberg, 1525. Four books: lines, spirals & the conic sections; the plane figures, polygons & tilings; columns, sundials & the constructed alphabet; and the five solids, their nets, and the perspective machines. The first mathematics printed in German for the working artist.
- The edition
- Alfred Peltzer, Albrecht Dürers Unterweisung der Messung. Süddeutsche Monatshefte, Munich, 1908. Dürer's German modernized in spelling and lightly abridged, his woodcut figures reproduced, with a foreword by the painter Hans Thoma.
- The digitisation
- Scanned and released by Google Books from a public-domain copy: the settled ground this reader rests on.
- This edition
- Peltzer's 197 leaves rendered to lazy-loading plates and set whole on the dark-gold ground, each page paired with a fresh English translation made here from Peltzer's German (the original a click away), a modern four-book index threaded through the scroll, and a Midnight smart-invert by default. Reader design, the translation, and modern apparatus all mine, released for non-commercial use in the spirit of the open inheritance it draws from.
To the digitisers and librarians who keep five-century-old workshop manuals openable on a screen, and to Alfred Peltzer, who carried Dürer's German across four hundred years so the rest of us could still read it — this edition bows. You are the reason any of this is possible. Thank you.