Reconstructing French Art History: Students Use Golden Section to Build Medieval Cathedral Plan
Art history students use the medieval geometric principle of the Golden Section to reconstruct a French Middle Ages Cathedral. Dr. Jennifer Feltman, a visiting professor at the University of West Florida, explains how spatial reasoning contributes to architecture, graphic design, and history.


English (auto-generated)


So today, my students are laying out the plan of a cathedral using medieval geometry. In the Middle Ages, they continued to use ancient geometry very much like was used to lay out the Parthenon, for example, in Athens, but instead it was used to lay out cathedral plans. In art history, a lot of our time with students is in the classroom where we're lecturing from slides, and we don't often have the opportunity to do on-site visits or see objects in person. I think that for one thing, learning about cathedrals, because they're absolutely three-dimensional objects, one needs some sort of hands-on experiential aspect. 


Well, I kind of led my individual appeal. I mostly just hammered in the stakes and kind of gave them some direction on all of that. Everything with this particular project definitely clicked with me in terms of getting a grasp on all the geometric aspects of it and being able to lay it all out. 


So it was nice to see people come up with different ideas and see like, "Oh wow, that's really brilliant. I wouldn't have thought to dissect it into fives and then this is how we now lay out the apse or the arcs." So it was a lot of fun for me. It really challenged me. I was brilliant. 


So we've laid out the central part of the cathedral known as the crossing using a mathematical ratio called the golden section to create the golden section. What you do is you diagonal a rectangle from the square in the center and then rotate it out all the way to the edge. It's a proportional system that comes from ancient architecture, and you actually find it in even actually UWW symbol—the nautilus symbol. 


From there, we have a choir in French buildings. They began designing churches with radiating chapels. Each chapel would be dedicated to a saint, and so our students here have located center points for each of the five chapels, and then, again using string, have walked around the radius to lay out the boundary lines of that chapel.


It's a very fascinating activity that really allowed me to understand and better understand what we're, what we've been studying. 


They might take this knowledge into their graphic design classes. They might take knowledge of the golden section and use it for layouts. They might also just take the idea of spatial reasoning into everyday life, and so learning about simple principles of geometry have applications beyond just the classroom.