Universe of Stone by Philip Ball

Author:Philip Ball
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061970078
Publisher: HarperCollins

Rigid distinctions that continue to be made between practical, theoretical, and allegorical geometry are likely to be more modern than medieval…It is unlikely that a patron would have understood the lodge practice behind the mason’s markings on a keystone any more than a mason would understand how the geometrical figures he was so used to constructing related to the cosmological speculations of Christian Platonist thought. Yet these were undoubtedly the ends of a single spectrum of understanding.

To illustrate this point, Hiscock adduces the sculptors’ use of a lens-shaped figure called the vesica piscis, within which Christ is often seated in majesty. This design is found in the Royal Portal at Chartres, and also in the early eleventh-century cathedral at Aachen, in the twelfth-century Norman nave at Ely, and on the tympana of Autun (1130–40) and Vézelay (c.1125–30). It seems to have been a feature of Christian art since at least the tenth century. The shape comes directly from geometrical theory. It is found, for example, in Boethius’s Ars geometriae et arithmeticae, where he explains that it is the region of overlap between two equal circles whose circumferences pass through one another’s centres. Boethius explains that this construction, which can be made with a pair of compasses, may be used to construct an equilateral triangle, the most ‘perfect’ of triangles. So it would have been used to frame the figure of Christ not simply because it was a pleasing and convenient shape but because of its Platonic connotations. Of course, once this became a convention the masons need have known nothing about the symbolism–but the link was there.

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