The art world has felt the influence of the Golden Ratio for centuries. Also known as the Golden Section or the Divine Proportion, this mathematical principle is an expression of the ratio of two sums whereby their ratio is equal to the larger of the two quantities.
Leonardo Da Vinci, The Last Supper (1494-99). Image: Wikipedia.
During the Renaissance, painter and draftsman Leonardo Da Vinci used the proportions set forth by the Golden Ratio to construct his masterpieces. Sandro Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Georges Seurat, and others appear to have employed this technique in their artwork.
Gary Meisner on the Golden Number blog has mapped the geometric underpinnings of select paintings via software, which can be seen below:
Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (1483-85). Image: Wikipedia.
Image: Gary Meisner, thegoldennumber.net.
Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (1508-12). Image: Wikipedia.
Image: Gary Meisner, thegoldennumber.net.
The number phi, often known as the golden ratio, is a mathematical concept that people have known about since the time of the ancient Greeks. It is an irrational number like pi and e, meaning that its terms go on forever after the decimal point without repeating.
Over the centuries, a great deal of lore has built up around phi, such as the idea that it represents perfect beauty or is uniquely found throughout nature. But much of that has no basis in reality.
In the 19th century, artists Georges Seurat and Edward Burne-Jones organized their compositions with the help of geometry.
Seurat’s Post-Impressionist painting Bathers at Asinères (1884) can be broken down into three rectangles delimiting the fore-, middle-, and backgrounds, for example. And the arc of Burne-Jones’s staircase is the focal point of The Golden Stairs (1876-1880), around which the other elements are arranged.
Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières (1884). Image: Wikipedia.
Edward Burne-Jones, The Golden Stairs (1876-1880). Image: Wikipedia.
Though modernism drifts away from a strict use of the Golden Ratio, geometry figures heavily in many movements at this time. Clean lines and shapes in primary colors populate paintings and graphics, as evidenced by Constructivism, Suprematism, and De Stijl.
Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition (1916). Image: Wikipedia.