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Ever since learning about projective geometry and its birth in the world of art, I’ve been intrigued to learn more about their union and how they influenced each other.
I’m specifically looking for references that show how the needs of art led to new math and how math fed back into art, from the renaissance onward. Projections, spherical drawings, Escher’s twisted perspectives, prominent contributors to both fields etc.
Any good books/references that sit at the intersection of the two fields?
An exceptional book about that subject is Kirsti Andersen's The Geometry of an Art: The History of the Mathematical Theory of Perspective from Alberti to Monge, published by Springer.
A fascinating and recent development has been the discovery of quasicrystals and an early account is to be found in István Hargittai (ed) Fivefold Symmetry, World scientific, 1992. Emil Makovicky, Symmetry: Through the Eyes of Old Masters (2016) is a newer treatment (see also some other writings by Makovicky and Hargittai or just get a peek at the (online) Tilings encyclopedia). The roots of the topic are in writings about the Fibonacci sequence, the Golden mean, the platonic solids etc and Martha Boles & Rochelle Newman, The Golden Relationship : Art, Math & Nature, vols 1-2 (1992) might be of interest. Other recent topics are fractals and chaos theory with a classic The beauty of fractals by Heinz-Otto Peitgen and Peter Richter (1986). A century ago the 4th dimension was a buzz topic and it became entangled in the devlopement of cubism see e.g. Tony Robbin, Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought, 2006
