Sunday, October 22, 2017

VITRUVIUS

VITRUVIUS One word can unlock a torrent of mysteries. Or seal them securely . The word "Vitruvius ," is one such word. A nude Ethiopian man on the cover of Plotinus ' THE ENNEADS, (1991) published by Penguin Books, a classic 3rd Century philosophy book, was called "Vitruvius," by a Facebook friend. She was happily harkening back to college courses, where she had learned it. I heard it, when she said it, both times; but I did not bother to pursue its origin. Then, yesterday, October 21, 2017, I finally saw the word "Vitruvius' in print, viz: "We have seen in the Introduction that the technique for which, in a complex plan or design, the proportions are linked so as to get the right correlation (or commodulation) between the whole and its parts was called by the Greek architects and Vitruvius 'Symmetry'; and the result obtained where this technique was correctly applied was the 'eurhythmy' of the design and of the building." P. 5, "Proportions in Time and Space," THE GEOMETRY OF ART AND LIFE by Matila Ghyka (1946, 1977). When I looked up Vitruvius in Wikipedia, it said that his origins were obscure and that there were no images of him; that he was known only by his classic work of architecture, "De Architectura" a work in ten volumes. Hints about the man himself, a Roman military engineer from North Africa, evoked Euclid, another African identified as Greek, as Vitruvius was as Roman. Being blunt: Vitruvius and Euclid, are men of African descent, if single men, or, if not, are a guild or group of people, whose respective cognomen are representative of the cognoscenti of learned men whose works were appropriated by others, over 1,000 years after they were first written. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura