ABSTRACT
If one takes the trouble to delve into some of the proportional analysis of the ‘poor old
Parthenon’…it will be seen that almost anything under the sun can be proved…Can one
blame sceptics if they brush aside the whole quest for proportion as a silly pastime,
5.1 NUMERICAL AND GEOMETRICAL INTERPRETATIONS
Pythagoras was active around 530 BC. Plato, the subject of the next chapter, died in 347
BC. Between these two dates, virtually the whole of the mathematics necessary for the
subsequent history of architectural proportion was worked out by the Greeks. During the
same period, they also built a series of buildings that many regard as among the most
perfectly proportioned structures ever designed: the temple of Apollo, Corinth (c. 540
BC); the temple of Aphaia, Aegina (c. 500-475 BC); the temple of Zeus, Olympia (c. 460
BC); and in Athens the Hephaisteion (449-444 BC), the Parthenon (447-432 BC), the
Propylaea (437-432 BC), the temple of Athena Nike (c. 425 BC) and the Erechtheum
(421-405 BC). The conclusion that the two developments were connected is an obvious
one. John Pennethorne, whose Elements and Mathematical Principles of the Greek
Architects and Artists appeared in 1844, believed that among the ancient Greeks not only
were art and mathematics regarded as a unity, but it was art that led the way for
mathematical studies, just as the physical sciences were stimulating them in modern
Europe. He writes that:
A very superficial investigation of the remaining works of Athenian architecture
is, I think, sufficient to prove the close and inseparable union that existed between the
geometry and the arts of ancient Greece. When we consider the state of the Greek
astronomy at the time when both the arts and the geometry had attained their highest
point, it appears natural to conclude…that the division of ancient art, at the head of
which Plato has placed architecture, was the practical science of the Greeks, and the
one that chiefly excited them to the study and cultivation of the several branches
of the mathematics; for it is now ascertained that all the branches of the Greek
If Pennethorne’s opinion is correct, it extends the speculation in the last chapter that the
circle-and-square geometry that arose in building, pottery and weaving may have been
the source of early cosmological ideas; but is such a conclusion justified, as Pennethorne
asserts, by the architectural evidence?
