I am almost certainly speaking from a position of extreme ignorance–but, in general, I don’t ‘get’ the supposed golden ratio in famous art works. To me, every time I see an example on the internet, it just looks like a nice mathematical spiral arbitrarily superimposed over the picture (and often not even the *whole* picture)… with nothing specific I can see attributing a particular balance or ratio of colour, form, space, composition… etc. within the sections, lines, or whorls of the spiral.
I do have a reasonable understanding of basic art and composition like the rule of thirds and negative space… but I can see the immediate logic of those.
I’ve seen a few other posts on this topic but they seem to start from the position that this golden ratio is a given in much great art, and then go from there. Can someone explain–what do I not see or understand in the application?
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It’s mostly made up. All of this seeing the golden ratio and spirals in art is after the fact, ad hoc shoe horning.
[https://plus.maths.org/content/myths-maths-golden-ratio](https://plus.maths.org/content/myths-maths-golden-ratio)
Yes, there are some artists that deliberately used it in their work, but for most part it’s people just making shit up.
It’s made up.
Art has never just been about looking pretty. Art has always been an expression and a form of communication. Around the Renaissance, some artists (and architects) decided that one of the purposes of their art was to inspire learning and rationality in others.
However, they did not use the Golden Ratio for this purpose! For reasons relating to the relationships between mathematics and philosophy, Renaissance thinkers actually disliked the entire class of numbers that could not be easily represented by the ratio of whole numbers – like 2/3 or 5/7. It was in the 19th Century that artists and architects started getting very excited about the Golden Ratio, often to the point of back-projecting it to the Renaissance, which they considered to be the start of “rational” art.
For example, da Vinci’s *Vitruvian Man* is often used as an example of a work involving the Golden Ratio, but da Vinci’s own commentary gives integer ratios: 4 fingers to a palm, 4 palms to a foot, 6 palms (or 3/2 foot) to a forearm, 4 forearms to human height. The distance from the chin to the top of the head is 1/8 of your height; the distance from the top of the chest to the top of the head is 1/6 of the height, etc. etc. We don’t even see ratios suggestive of the Golden Ratio, like 8/5 or 13/8.
Notably, he says that if you spread your legs so that your head’s height is lowered by 1/14 of the height, your legs will be an equilateral triangle. In fact, using his measurements, the amount to lower your head for this to be the case should be 1/2 – sqrt(3)/4. Which is closer to 1/15, but at any rate is *not expressible as a ratio of whole numbers*. Which Renaissance people didn’t like.
But artists and especially architects decided that the Golden Ratio was important for biological proportions, and that biological proportions were important for architecture, and not only started using it themselves, but back-projected it onto older works.
Honestly, there are two main uses of the Golden Ratio:
* Multiplying by the Golden Ratio gives you something very close to the next element of the Fibonacci sequence (there’s also a small correction factor; and it is actually the Fibonacci sequence that appears in things like sunflowers and nautilus shells).
* The Golden Ratio is about 1% off from the ratio between miles and kilometers
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