Having first learned the divine theory of music from the priests of the various Mysteries into which he had been accepted, Pythagoras pondered for several years upon the laws governing consonance and dissonance.
One day while meditating upon the problem of harmony, Pythagoras chanced to pass a brazier’s shop where workmen were pounding out a piece of metal upon an anvil. By noting the variances in pitch between the sounds made by large hammers and those made by smaller implements, and carefully estimating the harmonies and discords resulting from combinations of these sounds, he gained his first clue to the musical intervals of the diatonic scale.
Pythagoras is now generally credited with the discovery of the diatonic scale. To Pythagoras music was one of the dependencies of the divine science of mathematics, and its harmonies were inflexibly controlled by mathematical proportions.
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The Platonic solids feature prominently in the philosophy of Plato, who wrote about them in the dialogue Timaeus. There, he associated each of the four classical elements (earth, air, water, and fire) with a regular solid. The fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, Plato obscurely remarks, “…the god used for arranging the constellations on the whole heaven”.
Euclid gave a complete mathematical description of the Platonic solids in the Elements, the last book (Book XIII) of which is devoted to their properties.
The Platonic solids are also called “cosmic figures” and are the basic modules for Sacred Geometry. The tetrahedron, cube, and octahedron all occur naturally in crystal structures.
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Sunday Dalí: promotional photo for The Dream of Venus designed by Dalí, photographed by Murray Korman, 1939. Black and white photo.
The Dream of Venus was Dalí’s pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. You can see several photos and explaniations of the fair in this slide deck [PDF] by Christine Trotter.
One scene in the pavilion (figure 10 in the deck) features a young girl shushing the audience while the nude Venus sleeps, dreaming. Unlike Dalí’s other works where the unreal and the real combine in the mind of the audience, here the unreal becomes real through the use of actresses.
I could never imagine such a spectacle in a public fair today. The USA today hyperventilates over Janet Jackson’s not-quite-exposed breast, yet 73(!) years ago no cries of abuse or indecency rang out even while this young actress was working and mingling with several nude women. It seems like the 1939 USA knew how to react to provocative and beautiful art. Somewhere along the way, sadly, we (Americans) lost that.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2ufqencjZ1qzse0lo1_1280.png)
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Sunday Dalí: promotional photo for The Dream of Venus designed by Dalí, photographed by Murray Korman, 1939. Black and white photo.
The Dream of Venus was Dalí’s pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. You can see several photos and explaniations of the fair in this slide deck [PDF] by Christine Trotter.
One scene in the pavilion (figure 10 in the deck) features a young girl shushing the audience while the nude Venus sleeps, dreaming. Unlike Dalí’s other works where the unreal and the real combine in the mind of the audience, here the unreal becomes real through the use of actresses.
I could never imagine such a spectacle in a public fair today. The USA today hyperventilates over Janet Jackson’s not-quite-exposed breast, yet 73(!) years ago no cries of abuse or indecency rang out even while this young actress was working and mingling with several nude women. It seems like the 1939 USA knew how to react to provocative and beautiful art. Somewhere along the way, sadly, we (Americans) lost that.
(via idi0teque)
