England's "Architecture as Mathematical Practice" on Display at Yale

January 13, 2010

Yale University's Center for British Art will be the only North American venue to showcase "Compass & Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England, 1500-1750."

The exhibit, which goes on display in February, will feature examples of the period's finest architectural drawings, manuscripts, maps, models, and scientific instruments. Notably, Thomas Heath's "Architectonic Sector to the Design of Ottavio Revesi Bruti," ca. 1737; Christopher Wren's "Study Design for the Dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral" (in two half-sections, each incorporating the curve of a cubic parabola), ca. 1690; a page from Inigo Jones’s annotated copy of Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Regola delli cinque ordini (1607) (showing a diagram of the Attic base); and Thomas Gemini's "Astrolabe for Queen Elizabeth I," 1559.

Identified as a branch of practical mathematics, architecture became the most artistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the arts. Mathematics during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was understood as a practical set of activities rather than a pure and abstract discipline. Astronomy, navigation, and surveying were all considered mathematical arts, united by common foundations in arithmetic and geometry. During this period, English rather than Latin became the language for mathematical texts and treatises that taught practitioners how to design in the “new” classical style. During this time period the commercial trade of mathematical instrument making was also founded in London, based on a relationship between publishing and manufacturing.

Source: Yale Center for British Art(pdf)