Abstract
For nearly 200 years a red and white terra cotta pavement designed by Michelango for the Laurentian Library in Florence lay hidden beneath the floorboards until its rediscovery in 1774. Overall the pavement consists of two side aisles and a figurative center aisle, each measuring about 8′–6″ square and composed of a different design. The 15 panels mirror each other’s form but differ by a very small degree and in subtle ways. When juxtaposed in a series, the 15 pairs of panels appear to tell a story about the essentials of geometry and numbers. Each panel settles upon a theme: the tetractys (panel 5); Brunés’s star and the Sacred Cut (panels 7 and 11); Plato’s lambda (panel 14); the Golden Mean (panel 13). When assembled together they form an encyclopedia of the essential principles handed down from ancient geometers. The pavement geometry is a perfect complement for the 3,000 classical texts chosen to reveal the body of ancient and modern living.
First published as: Ben Nicholson , Jay Kappraff and Saori Hisano , “The Hidden Pavement Designs of the Laurentian Library ”, pp. 87–98 in Nexus II: Architecture and Mathematics, ed. Kim Williams, Fucecchio (Florence): Edizioni dell Erba, 1998.
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Notes
- 1.
This construction was also described by Paul Marchant, a member of Keith Critchlow’s London-based group studying traditional geometry; see Marchand (1997).
References
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Acknowledgements
Author Ben Nicholson thanks the Laurentian Library for permission to make rubbings of the panels to assemble a set of accurate measurements. All figures herein are by the authors.
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Nicholson, B., Kappraff, J., Hisano, S. (2015). The Hidden Pavement Designs of the Laurentian Library. In: Williams, K., Ostwald, M. (eds) Architecture and Mathematics from Antiquity to the Future. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00143-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00143-2_9
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