ABSTRACT
It is interesting, and perhaps revealing, that the various design solutions, that were proposed by those architects and engineers who were called to Milan at the end of the fourteenth century to advise on the heights for the construction of its new cathedral, were proportioned according to the triangle and apparently the square, but not the pentagon, for there is abundant evidence of the architectural use of the pentagon throughout the Middle Ages. From Theodoric’s Mausoleum in sixth-century Ravenna to the thirteenth-century chapter house at Lincoln (Fig. 122b), the building of ten-sided, or decagonal, structures would almost certainly have required knowledge of the pentagon and so would construction of the pentagram, which was commonplace, from being known originally as an emblem of the Pythagoreans to its appearance on the shield of Sir Gawain in the fourteenth century1 and the north transept window of Amiens Cathedral around 1400.2 Its absence from the Milan debate might simply be explained that it continued in use, as the evidence in the next chapter proves, but not for elevating cathedral structures,3 or that it did, but not among the few lodges represented by those consultants who were called to Milan.
