Printmaker and illustrator Jost Amman was born on June 13, 1539 in Zurich, Switzerland. His father was Johann Jakob Amman, a professor rhetoric, logic, and ancient languages at the Collegium Carolinum. He and his wife Elisabeth Egger hosted various scholars, antiquities experts, and luminaries at their home, fostering an intellectually and culturally significant environment that influenced Amman's career path. He would become one of the last major woodcut technique artists before engraving surpassed it as the leading printmaking medium. 

Among his best known works is an illustrated book of perspectives of polyhedra, Perspectiva corporum regularium, written by Wenzel Jamnitz in 1568 and considered one of the most "lavish of the perspective books published in the Germany in the late sixteenth century." 

Jost Amman died in Nuremberg, Bavaria in 1591.