I understand the math but I have no idea how it connects to art or “aesthetically pleasing shapes”.
Every image I see looks like a spiral slapped randomly onto a painting, and sometimes not even the entirety of the painting. The art never seems to follow any of the apparent guidelines of the spiral. I especially don’t understand it when it’s put on a persons face.
I can see and understand the balance of artistic uses of things such as “the rule of 3rds” and negative space, dynamic posing, etc. However, I cannot comprehend how the golden ratio attributes anything to the said * balance * of a work of art.
I saw an image of Parthenon in Athens, Greece with the golden ratio spiral over it. It’s just a symmetrical, rectangular building. I don’t understand how the golden ratio applies to it.
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Think of it like a motion capture suit. There are point on the suit that you can connect with that spiral. The only reason it’s a spiral is because sometimes you have to inflate the suit, so the spiral just ensures you can always connect the points, regardless of how big it is.
The truth is that the vast, vast majority of the claims of the “Golden Ratio” or “Golden Spiral” in aesthetics and art are simply nonsense. You can safely ignore any images or videos overlaying the Golden Spiral onto buildings or paintings.
*Most* of the claims of the Golden Ratio being used in art and architecture are false or lacking in evidence. However due to the popularity of the myths around the Golden Ratio there are some works of art that include it intentionally. If those ratios are particularly beautiful lies in the eye of the beholder.
The vast majority of references to the golden *spiral* specifically are either memes or made by people who don’t really understand it. It isn’t that magical and it doesn’t actually occur nearly as often as some people claim.
The golden *ratio* is related to the golden spiral, but that doesn’t mean that things that follow the golden ratio will somehow look like the golden spiral. Rectangles whose sides follow the golden ratio are called “golden rectangles”. In isolation, one golden rectangle doesn’t look anything like the golden spiral, so slapping a picture of the spiral on top of a single shape is just kind of silly. The way the two are connected is when you nest a bunch of successively smaller golden rectangles in each other by partitioning off squares of each rectangle, like [this image](https://images.prismic.io/sketchplanations/06972f44-148a-4969-8127-f69f68fda84b_152869679136.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=max&w=3840&q=50). You can imagine that only having one rectangle and none of the other internal lines would look significantly less interesting or connected.
Supposedly there are some dimensions in the Parthenon that follow this ratio, but I think it is debated how intentional that actually was. And again, just slapping the golden *spiral* on top of a rectangle is highly unlikely to look like anything.
Think of it like this. 4 quadrants offset by 90 in location and phase of the Fibonacci or golden spiral, rotating around the center via Pi. Or Phi^4+Pi = 10 – Unity. Seek the quintilis academy – Namaste I bow to our light
It’s pseudo-intellectual bullshit. The golden ratio does occur in certain places in nature, but it’s not as significant as people make it out to be.
I’ll give you one example of the golden ratio at work that isn’t complete bullshit. Let’s say you want build a regular icosahedron (that is a 20-sided polyhedral with the same triangular sides) (a d20 if you’re a D&D gamer). You can determine the points of the d20 with 3 golden rectangles each oriented along different pairs of axes. A golden rectangle is a rectangle whose sides have a ratio of 1 to ((1+sqrt(5))/2), that is 1 to the golden ratio.
I find d20s beautiful. Don’t you?
The golden ratio kind of just happens when you build things up proportionally. It is a side effect of having previous values being used to determine the next values.
Most people know that the ratio between consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence approach the golden ratio – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89. 89/55 = 1.618. But few people understand that it doesn’t matter what two numbers you start with, the ratio still approaches 1.618. Start with 1 and 5, or 3 and -124, or 492847491 and 0; you will always approach the golden ratio.
It just so happens that when people create stuff, we tend to do it with blocks. Whether it’s bricks or Sheetrock or windows or beams when building a building. Or it’s using a ruler and compass to draw a design. Or it is symmetry and perspective to layout a scene. We create in a way where the next steps rely on the previous.
So the golden ratio kind of just happens. It is rarely intentional. It is kind of like Pi – anything that involves a circle has ratios with Pi. Anything that involves iterations where you build on what already exists involves ratios with the golden ratio.
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