Abstract

Full paper prices: €32 / €24 / €60

Open Access price: €600

Symmetry: Culture and Science
Volume 31, Number 3, pages 321-351 (2020)
https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2020_3_321

EMPIRE, SCIENCE AND GEOMETRY AT THE ORIGINS OF EARLY MODERN ARCHITECTURE

Ioseph Cabeza-Laïnez^1*, Ying Ying Xu²

¹ Department of Architectural Composition and Theory, University of Seville, 2 Av. Reina Mercedes, Seville 41012, Spain
E-mail: crowley@us.es
ORCID: 0000-0003-1763-9452

² Department of Oriental Studies, University of Seville, 20-22 Av. Ciudad Jardín, Seville 41005, Spain
E-mail: xying@us.es

^* corresponding author

Abstract: This article explores the inceptions of architectural science. Camillo Guarino Guarini, the celebrated author of sundry kaleidoscopic symmetries, is the first one to utter an explicit written colligation between Mathematics and Magic on one side and Light and Architecture on the other. Pellegrino Tibaldi, together with the Jesuit builders of El Escorial, the monumental Palace cum Basilica of Spanish Emperor Phillip the Second, enshrined a set of enigmas for the future regarding the issue that only we have recently begun to disclose. In the Eastern Empire of China, which still calls itself the Empire of the Centre, similar questions were poised through Daoist numerology and geomancy, evoking the perennial symmetry of nature. Eventually a fusion of horizons was attained in the miraculous architectural oeuvre of Giuseppe Castiglione or, more properly, Lang Shining (郎世宁), a third Northern Italian and arguably the last grand Chinese painter. In a collection of frescoes once exposed at his own building, the cathedral of Nantang in Beijing and later at the Juanqinzhai (卷勤斋), the retirement palace of Emperor Qianlong in the Forbidden City, it is possible to descry a mellow reconciliation between natural life and abstract geometry by virtue of focal perspective.

Keywords: architectural composition, theory of architecture, Modernism, architectural symbolism, Oriental studies

References:
Alexander, H.G., ed. (1956) The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence: Together with Extracts from Newton’s Principia and Optiks, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Bailey, G.A. (2001) Art on the Jesuit Mission in Asia and Latin America, 2nd ed. Toronto: Toronto University Press.

Cabeza-Laïnez, J.M. (2005) Fundamentals of Luminous Radiative Transfer. 1st Edition. Coruña. Netbiblo

Clark, A.E. (2008) China’s Thriving Catholics: A report from Beijing’s South Cathedral. Beijing: Ignatius Insight.

Derrida, J. (1978) Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, transl. by John P. Leavey, Jr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Giedion, S. (1967) The Eternal Present: The beginning of Art and Architecture. New York: University Press.

Gruson (2019) The spirit and the symbol in architecture: The divine proportion, Symmetry: Culture and Science, 29, 3, 5–14. https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2019_1_005

Guarini, G. (1671) Euclides Adauctus et Methodicus Mathematicaq[ue]; Universalis …, Turin: Typis Bartholomaei Zapatae Bibliopolae S.R.C., cxlvi + 686 p.

Ishida, M. (1960) A biographical study of Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining) a Jesuit painter in the Court of Peking under the Ch’ing Dynasty, Memoirs of the Research Institute of the Toyo Bunko, 19, 79–121.

Katona, V. (2018) Symmetries and proportions in architecture, Symmetry: Culture and Science, 29, 3, 325–327. https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2018_3_325

Katona, V. (2020) “Az Úr bevonul szentélyébe”: Kortárs római katolikus templomépítészet a liturgia tükrében (“The Lord Enters His Sanctuary”: Contemporary Roman Catholic Church Architecture in the Light of the Liturgy), Budapest: Szent István Társulat (St. Stephen Association Publishing House of the Holy See).

Legge, J., ed. (1962) The Texts of Taoism, Part 1: The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzŭ / The Writings of Chuang Tzŭ, New York: Dover Publications.

Melville, H. (1847) Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, New York: Harper & Brothers.

Milton, J. (1667) Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books, London: Samuel Simmons.

Montmignon, J.B. (1808) Choix de lettres édifiantes: Honneurs rendus par l’Empereur de Chine aux Européens, Paris: Maradan, v + 458 p.

Salingaros, N.A. (2018) Applications of the golden mean to architecture, Symmetry: Culture and Science, 29, 3, 329–335. https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2018_3_329

San Antonio, G.Q. (1998) A Brief and Truthful Relation of Events in the Kingdom of Cambodia, [originally published as “Breve y verdadera relacion de los successos del Reyno de Camboxa”, 1604, by Pedro Lasso, S. Pablo de Valladolid], Bangkok, Thailand: White Lotus Press, xxxiv + 186 p.

Suarez, A.H. (2009) Tao Te King, 5th ed., Madrid, Spain: Siruela.

Sypniewski, B.P. (2005) China and universals: Leibniz, binary mathematics, and the Yijing hexagrams, Monumenta Serica, 53, 1, 287–314. https://doi.org/10.1179/mon.2005.53.1.009

Robinet, I. (1999) Lao Zi Et Le Tao, Bayard Jeunesse: Paris.

Wilhelm, H. and Baynes, C.F. (1960) Change: Eight Lectures on the “I Ching”, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691200620

Yao, Yuanzi (1997) Zhuyeting zaji, [in Chinese], Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.