Tabula III: Kepler’s Mysterious Polyhedral Model

Abstract

The article addresses the genesis and visualization of the capstone image to Kepler’s polyhedral hypothesis of the planetary intervals from his first major work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). The contention is that the famous Tabula III was directed less by Kepler than it was an initiative spearheaded by Georg Gruppenbach, the printer of Mysterium, and Kepler’s mentor Michael Mäistlin, who sought to produce a marketable broadsheet that would appeal to the contemporary German fashion for illustrations of polyhedral geometry. More generally, the article seeks to redefine the key role played by the printing workshop and the decorative arts in the theory’s inception and ultimate graphic manifestation.

Gilding Kepler’s cosmology

“…7 Working with Mästlin and the university artist from Tübingen, and after much dispute with the printers, Mysterium was published with a fabulous, foldout pièce de résistance-Tabula III-an image that evocatively represented the space between the planets as skeletal Platonic solids. 8 To construct this image, Kepler and his collaborators borrowed from the convention of depicting imaginary geometries as three-dimensional physical models, vividly illustrated by Wenzel Jamnitzer's Perspectiva corporum regularium (1568) and other Southern German Renaissance artists ( Figure 2), as well as from the popular genre of Lehrbücher for teaching applied or practical geometry (also known as "mixed-mathematics"), many of which included perspectival images of the Platonic solids. 9 If Lehrbücher, for the late 16th-century university, were not integrated into the teaching curriculum and symbolized more than anything a tacit acknowledgement of the advancements that had been made in the production of an applied form of mathematics outside the university system, it was the court that was genuinely invested in appropriating mixed-mathematical knowledge and expertise.…”