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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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.
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