DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68516#0068
SENSIBILITY
buildings. As you know, various canons of proportion have been
discovered by measuring all the parts of a Greek Temple, and already
the Egyptians had probably been led, by the very immensity and
difficulty of their architectural problems, to study the mathematical
statement of such relations as the size of columns compared to the spaces
between them, the relation of the diameter of a column to its height and
so on. The Greeks carried this much further and established more
complicated systems emphasizing less obvious mathematical formulae.
Again in the Renaissance this study was vigorously pursued and the
relation known as the golden section was propounded and widely used,
whilst in recent times more elaborate studies have resulted in the dis-
covery of what is known as the 0 proportion or rather proportionate
series. The mathematical statement of this is a complicated one, and
like 77 it is an irrational number, which cannot be determined absolutely.
As 0 has been found applicable not only to a good many works of art
but to the simpler forms of organic life such as the spirals of shells and
growing plants, it has seemed to some people to be a kind of magic clue
to all beauty and the fulfilment of a dream which has often haunted men
of being able to turn out works of art as it were mechanically by the
simple application of a formula—a kind of philosopher’s stone of art.
At one time I remember the mot d’ordre in the Paris studios was Part
Pest le nombre, ‘art is a question of numbers’, and here in (f) the magic
number had turned up. But to indulge in such dreams is to forget the
difference between art and beauty, for the work of art may well not be a
beautiful thing in the sense in which a spiral shell is beautiful; and,
whether beautiful or not, it is its power of communicating to us the
artist’s state of mind that gives it its importance. And it is precisely in
the region which lies beyond any fixed and determined law that the
spirit reveals itself.
We have passed then from the simple relation of exact symmetry
through various more and more complex mathematical relations,
such as those which apply to the inorganic world of the crystal, to
which is approximately—but only approximately notice—applicable to
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buildings. As you know, various canons of proportion have been
discovered by measuring all the parts of a Greek Temple, and already
the Egyptians had probably been led, by the very immensity and
difficulty of their architectural problems, to study the mathematical
statement of such relations as the size of columns compared to the spaces
between them, the relation of the diameter of a column to its height and
so on. The Greeks carried this much further and established more
complicated systems emphasizing less obvious mathematical formulae.
Again in the Renaissance this study was vigorously pursued and the
relation known as the golden section was propounded and widely used,
whilst in recent times more elaborate studies have resulted in the dis-
covery of what is known as the 0 proportion or rather proportionate
series. The mathematical statement of this is a complicated one, and
like 77 it is an irrational number, which cannot be determined absolutely.
As 0 has been found applicable not only to a good many works of art
but to the simpler forms of organic life such as the spirals of shells and
growing plants, it has seemed to some people to be a kind of magic clue
to all beauty and the fulfilment of a dream which has often haunted men
of being able to turn out works of art as it were mechanically by the
simple application of a formula—a kind of philosopher’s stone of art.
At one time I remember the mot d’ordre in the Paris studios was Part
Pest le nombre, ‘art is a question of numbers’, and here in (f) the magic
number had turned up. But to indulge in such dreams is to forget the
difference between art and beauty, for the work of art may well not be a
beautiful thing in the sense in which a spiral shell is beautiful; and,
whether beautiful or not, it is its power of communicating to us the
artist’s state of mind that gives it its importance. And it is precisely in
the region which lies beyond any fixed and determined law that the
spirit reveals itself.
We have passed then from the simple relation of exact symmetry
through various more and more complex mathematical relations,
such as those which apply to the inorganic world of the crystal, to
which is approximately—but only approximately notice—applicable to
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