The golden ratio

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

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?

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