ABSTRACT
To the extent possible within the limits of this book the authors have tried to appreciate the scope and enter into the mode of thinking and reasoning in the Middle Ages, to gain insight into processes of exercising and composing the mind, cogitatio, and ordering the affections, affectus. From texts on the liberal arts, likewise within constraints, we have deduced a heuretic of applications and outworkings of love in works of artists, architects and artificers emulating the creative Mind, their perception advancing from thinking, cogitatio, to seeing, aspectus. Proportion, similitude, abstraction and illumination indeed, all media of connection, are everywhere in buildings, patently in churches in the Middle Ages. Dialectic and rhetoric clearly operate in architecture, and as invention proceeds bringing in things to be incorporated, so must judgement be engaged by the architect. Then the artefact is, inevitably, a communication. Two aspects of a culture of particular relevance to architecture are tradition and directness.
