The Golden Section

After Veneziano
watercolour on paper
26.5 x 34.4 cm
1965

After the Fitzwilliam Veneziano
oil on canvas
101.5 x 101.5cm
1970

Golden Section Painting
oil on canvas
36 x 47 cm
[1967?]

Golden Section Cancellations
oil on canvas
127 x 101.6 cm
1966

Grand Sonata (Scarlatti Sonata)
oil on canvas 1965 - 1973, 107 x 152.5cm

Golden Section Cancellations
oil on canvas
101.6 x 127 cm 
1966

From Works and Texts (1992),  p. 214-217

In mundane geometrical terms a line is divided according to the Golden Section when the shorter part is to the longer as the longer is to the whole. (1:1.614 or, roughly, a division of an eight inch line into 3' + 5').

Euclid, who called this 'the extreme and mean ratio', thought it possessed of the highest geometrical economy. Platonists and Neo-Platonists have seen in it a mystical harmony that pervades all nature. It has been used (not without success) as a key to unlock the mysteries of the growth of things from the galaxies down to the spiralling of the shell of the smallest snail.

Its history in art is just as long. Even the most ill-proportioned visitor to Greece will have it in his bones before he leaves: temple and statue, pillar and pavement, speak the same harmony. Its rediscovery as one of the lost truths of antiquity lay at the heart of the Renaissance. As in the paradox of the poet freed by rhyme, the artist can be liberated by a system of great rigidity. The airy, tender and spacious compositions of Piero reveal, under geometrical analysis, that not an eye or elbow has its place but at the conjuntion of lines generated by the overall proportions of the picture.

I first became interested in the theory via one of those crackpot books which expound the secrets of the universe as revealed by The Great Pyramid with a little help from Stonehenge, and in 1964/65 made a number of abstract pictures based on it. One of these, a version of Domenico Veneziano's lovely Annunciation from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, still hangs on my bedroom wall.