Analysis Of The Concept Of Beauty

Develop your sensitivity to what the orientation of your visual direction shows, reacting more intensely to the stimuli of “raising to another level” the representation of an entity of mutual admiration.

- Albrecht Durer was not only a great painter, but also a passionate geometer. We could say that he was a born mathematician, because in the books he wrote, although they were addressed to young painters, there are important problems related to the theory of proportions, the golden section, conic sections, regular or semi-regular polyhedra, of angle trisection and cube duplication, and even some anticipations of analytic geometry. These problems aroused the admiration of Galileo and Kepler.

The contact with Italy, the evolution of studies on proportions, the deep reflection on the problems of art took Albrecht Durer to where the thinking of Italian theoreticians had not even deviated – to the analysis of the concept of beauty, to the debate of its essence and knowability. The Italians did not question whether beauty could be defined. But Albrecht Durer was convinced that one could objectively state what is beautiful and establish the aesthetic laws of that single, guiding ideal. Perhaps only Leonardo intuited, which is the point of pointing out that there is a variety of beauties and different aesthetic appreciations.

- That’s right. I know that Leonardo expressed himself in the following way: “Beautiful faces are different, as are different preferences for beauty.”

- I am thinking of the impression that Leonardo da Vinci made on Durer. Because he saw him. Perhaps you even heard him say those words, left in Chapter VII, entitled “On Perspective” of the Treatise on Painting: “Mathematics is necessary for the painter, belonging to his art. You must first study the science, then the practice of this science will come. Perspective is the guide and the door, without it nothing good can be done in painting”.

Leadership: Do you have the ability to memorize and represent expressively and sustainably the events you experienced, on the special line of an art that corresponds scientifically to the spiritual needs of the creators?

- I am almost sure of it, shows Durer’s reply in the preface to his first book that he wrote after returning from Italy, some guidelines for measuring with the compass and ruler: “Although the skill requires only a free hand, the work executed in this case is unconscious, and done only according to fancy. Looking at this work, understanding painters and true artists must laugh at the blindness of those executors, for nothing appears more distasteful to true understanding than falsehood in painting, even if it was painted with sufficient diligence. The fact that such painters find pleasure in their error comes from the fact that they have not learned the art of measurement, without which one cannot exist and cannot be a true craftsman.”

- Albrecht Durer also demonstrated his love or perhaps cult for geometry through his copper engraving entitled “Melancholia I”, which he executed in 1514 after returning from his second trip to Italy and apparently under the impression of the pain his mother’s death caused him. In this engraving, which has been commented on many times and in various ways, Melancholia took the form of geometry, being winged and holding a compass. She is worried. What is he thinking about? Couldn’t he establish the law that links beauty to mathematics? At her feet is a sphere, to her right a huge dodecahedron and above her head, on a wall, a magic square of the fourth order can be seen, which shows that in addition to problems of pure geometry, Durer was also more interested in this not an easy problem in number theory. While playing with this square, whose sum of digits is 34, I wondered if Durer did not choose this number as the constant of his square, because that year he was just 43 years old?

- This may be a mere coincidence, but it is not a mere coincidence that you noticed this magic square. I think it can be a very attractive topic for our next meeting. Don’t you agree?

In leadership, two spiritual needs specific to creators can be identified: the need to connect science with art, and the need to transform the data of reality in order to build an image that validates you as “a fragment of something even bigger”.

The Analysis Of The Concept Of Beauty is always done only by an artist who makes good abstract art, trying to express reality through images that use loose associations with other fields, such as mathematics, optics or physics. Here the artist can include different degrees of symbolization, suggesting the sense of “measure” through the very form of an objective correlative.

There is a sensitivity in art, due primarily to the mutual admiration between artists from different fields who managed to fuse different sciences together, expressing them symbolically in different images meant to link them to the Great Science. For this they developed their sensitivity to what the orientation of their visual direction showed.

For example, in order to raise to another level, the representation of an entity of mutual admiration, Albrecht Durer mirrored his mastery by taking various ideas from the works of Leonardo da Vinci in his own Opera.

* Note: Câmpan, Florica - Povestiri cu proporţii şi simetrii, Editura Albatros, 1985.