According to Pliny the Elder in The Natural History, 77-79 C.E. (in an example of laodogmatika that Polybius would have contested) the art of painting originated with people tracing the outlines of one another’s shadows. Pliny later alludes…The Polybius square is a matrix cipher that fractionates plaintext, breaking the alphabet into five columns with five letters each except for the last (with four). Each letter is represented by two numbers, allowing the 24 characters of the…The Polybius square is a matrix cipher that fractionates plaintext, breaking the alphabet into five columns with five letters each except for the last (with four). Each letter is represented by two numbers, allowing the 24 characters of the…
Albrecht Dürer
artist · 4 mentions across 2 readings
In this course
Dürer appears only as a passing reference in these course materials, mentioned in relation to shadow-tracing and the ancient origins of representational art. The excerpts primarily concern themselves with layering, encryption, and classical systems of information ordering—Pliny's shadow theory and the Polybius cipher—rather than Dürer's own work or theory, so his relevance to the seminar's concerns with cybernetics and computational systems remains indirect and underdeveloped here.
Background
Albrecht Dürer, sometimes spelled in English as Durer or Duerer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.
Wikipedia →Mentioned in 2 readings
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.