Trigger Happy
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the
Timaeus,
Plato’s eponymous speaker reasons that
the entire universe is made up of simple geometrical
shapes that can be represented by the first four
numbers: one is a point, two is a line, three is a triangle
and four is the simplest non-spherical solid, a triangular
pyramid. Numerological essays in cabbalism spring
from the same idea, and from medieval times onward
religious thinkers hoped that applying geometrical
analysis to the universe would enable them, in Stephen
Hawking’s retrospectively apt phrase, “to know the
mind of God.” In the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon
praised the religious power of the developing tradition
of “geometric figuring” in painting; making the figures
in religious scenes as lifelike as possible, he argued,
could induce in the pious a sense of actually witnessing
the events depicted.
Artists began to experiment with geometrical
analyses of that most important form, the human body.
Engravings by artists such as DÜrer and SchÖn show
how an understanding of corporeal proportion is aided
by reducing the body to simple geometrical building
blocks. But this method was not just a device or a
trick. The Dutch artist Crispyn van der Passe, for
instance, produced in 1643 a large encyclopedia of
