The lecture presents an analysis of Jamnitzer’s book Perspectiva corporum regularium which was published in Nürnberg in 1568. Jamnitzer’s book makes reference to Plato’s Timaeus and expresses the view that the Universe is composed of the four elements and the fifth essence to which regular bodies are assigned. The trigonal symmetry which possess the Platonic bodies are alusion to the Holy Trinity and fits to a prominent religious aspect of the book which venerates Creation. Mixing of the elements forms diversity of our World and this is why Jamnitzer shows complex bodies, among them Great stellated dodecahedron. In other words, the depicted bodies are geometric representations of the complex Universe. Most importantly, the book is in agreement with Platonic philosophy as well as with Christian creed which consider the Universe as being composed of visible and in principle invisible parts. This division is manifested by the fact that the book shows the five Platonic and derived bodies in two representations: Those with surface and those which are represented by bodies the edges of which are shown only. Jamnitzer calls the former bodies,,gannz“ (full) or ,,irdische“ (Earthly) while the latter ones as ,,durchsichtig“ (transparent). In the context of Jamnitzer’s book, ,,transparent“ rather means ,,invisible“. The ,,transparent“ bodies levitate which indicates their immateriality. Visibility is related to perspective which distorts the physical world which is caught by sight. However, geometry in contrast to perspective is able to correct this distortion by reasoning and get a human being together with arithmetic nearer to God.
Jamnitzer’s book is an important example of culture of the late 15-th, 16-th and 17-th centuries with occassional leaps even to the 18-th and the 9-th centuries. This culture gave rise to Kepler’s achievements in the field of astronomy. However, the part of Kepler’s Strena seu de Nive sexangula (Franfurt a. Mein, 1611) in which Kepler speculateted about the underlying close packed spherical corpuscles which imprinted hexagonal shape into the snowflakes is exception in Kepler’s work and this will be discussed during the lecture.