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"The
church or temple should be the noblest ornament of a city
and its staggering beauty should awaken the sublime sensations
and piety."
~ Alberti 1404
- 1472
Having developed
a curiosity of sacred space and the harmony associated to
them, I have been asking for articles on the subject 0 I
am thinking of the association to painting and the ways
that artists of the past would develop their compositions
using determined 'mathematical divisions. I just returned
from Santa Barbara, where I visited my architect and high
school friend, Kirk Gradin.
So here are
some notes:
Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher / mathematician, is credited
with first applying the term “kosmos” meaning
literally “world-order” or “ordered world”
to the universe. The term also has the connotation of “adornment”
or “ornamentation” which is another way of saying
that the universe is “ornamented with order,”
a beautifully harmonious, law-governed unity.
Cosmogony, sometimes
used synonymously with Cosmology, is the systematic study
of the origins of the universe as a rational and orderly
system and of the most general and pervasive concepts that
can be applied to it.
Ancient cosmogony
was with the metaphysical, deific and sacred dimensions
of the origins of existence. It presupposed a spiritual
or divine essence as the primary generator and intelligent
ordering principle behind and within the phenomenal universe.
It is the noumenal (beyond tangibility to the senses, known,
or identified, only through the intellect - reflection)
causes behind the visible, which because they are unchanging,
(as numbers) universally pervasive and therefore “divine,”
are possessed of a greater reality, meaning and significance
than that which we can perceive with our senses and touch
with our hands. For the Pythagoreans, Number is not something
to be used, but its nature is to be discovered. It is “the
principle, the source and root of all things” says
Theon of Smyrna. Number therefore not only possesses a symbolic
character, but is a living, qualitative reality at the essence
of things.
In this sense,
number is considered the 'divine language', because numbers
are unchanging and 'true' and ordered (and therefore divine,
as God is unchanging and Truth). In this language, order
can be applied to foundations and environments so as to
resonate with our spirit.
The greatest
of art and architecture and music: their purpose is to “lift
the mind on high” to “grasp at eternal and incorporeal
images...to draw the soul towards truth and to enable it
ultimately to see the final aim of philosophy, the idea
of the Good.” - and here I would interject, "God."
the more our
earthly arts incorporate cosmogenic concepts, the more it
they become an instrument which may serve and aid us spiritually
as a contemplative guide on man’s return path to the
reflection upon and submission to the divine. The applied
art can and should serve the philosophical one. This is
without doubt the central theme of Hindu and Buddhist classical
architecture, of many of the great sacred temples and architectural
wonders of diverse traditions and is mirrored perhaps most
faithfully in theory and practice in the west by the efforts
made in both ecclesiastic and domestic architecture in the
Renaissance.
The prime purpose
of visible or audible Beauty is to incite Love through the
recollection it solicits by a reflection of the divine order
within external or visible forms.
“One cannot
describe how much more easily the sight of Beauty inspires
love than words do. If therefore, we could present the wonderful
aspect of Virtue itself to the eyes of man there would no
longer be any need for our art of persuasion.
~
Marcilio Ficino
The
Circle, “...it is enclosed by one circumference only,
in which is to be found neither beginning nor end, and the
one is indistinguishable from the other; its parts correspond
to each other and all of them participate in the shape of
the whole; and moreover every part being equally distant
from the centre such a building demonstrates extremely well
the unity, the infinite essence, the uniformity and the
justice of God....We cannot doubt, that the little temples
we make, ought to resemble this very great one, which, by
His immense goodness, was perfectly completed with one Word
of His.”
~ I Quatro Libri
Bk. I, chap ii
the dome, whose
cosmic symbolism has a long pedigree going back to Islamic
and Byzantine influences. It is both the vault of the visible
sky and the Dome of Heaven, the celestial realm of supreme
beatitude under which “the soul may rise to the pure
contemplation of God.”
Francesco Giorgio
showed in his treatise on Harmonia Mundi, a blending of
Christian and Neoplatonic thought published in 1534, that
certain musical proportions, correspond with the double
and triple proportions given by Plato in the Timaeus as
the fundamental divisions of order and harmony inherent
in the cosmos and in the structure of the human soul. Classical
writers of musical theory in the Renaissance had discussed
this point at great length in their treatises. It was these
same ratios that were pointed to and utilized by Alberti,
Palladio and many others, as being those most efficacious
for translating universal harmonies into the spatial consonances
of architectural form. For them, it was not a vague question
of translating music into architecture, but of utilizing
a fundamental geometric and mathematical system of proportional
relationships whose universal validity had been given audible
proof. For Alberti, echoing the Platonic axiom, every man
has an inborn sense, an affinity within the soul, which
makes us aware of harmony. We therefore react instinctively,
even without rational analysis, when the building we are
in partakes of the vital force which lies behind all matter
and binds the universe together.
Ficino called
architecture the highest of the sciences after mathematics
because it imposes mathematical form on matter, whose natural
state is formless and chaotic. To the extent that it achieves
an impress of harmonia upon its creation, to that extent
it becomes the mediator between man and the Good, can incite
man to service, friendship and reverence and provide a more
or less direct glimpse of the Platonic Idea. Ficino pointed
out how the contemplative person may utilize the temple
as an object of thought, expanding it through analysis of
its geometric and number forms in plan, elevation and perspective
back to its celestial proportions and cosmic meanings. The
practice of architecture is thus given a greater responsibility
and elevated to a kind of potential theurgy. In the neo-platonic
vision that inspired and guided generations of practicioners
in the plastic arts in the Renaissance, the artist, rather
than presenting the public with rules, produces a visual
symbol of a higher essence through which other men may be
led to the awareness and comprehension of the principles
of divine structure and of divine beauty... “That
we ...learning of the courses of intelligence in the heaven...and
partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate
the absolutely unerring courses of God.”
A further interesting
study would be the ideas stated above, where harmony thrives
with reason - in comparison to post-modern theory where
relativism questions rationality.
October
continued -
Foundation for the Biblical
Arts Official Launch.. >>10.12
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