Fig. 4: “L’Huomo di Vitruvio” and the Golden Section (Drawing: © Josep Gonzàlez) LLeonardo, like his contemporaries, investigates and brings a new vision to Vitruvius’ text, of which no drawing or graphic scheme has come down to us. He joins the circle with the square but, unlike Alberti and others, he does not center it on the man’s sex, like the square, but moves it toward the navel, precisely where the most celebrated proportion is fulfilled. And with a ratio of 5/3 (1.66666…), that is, an approximation to the use of the golden number (1.618033…), he rescues a dichotomy known since antiquity, “the squaring of the circle”, that is, the rectification of the celestial, the circle, into the earthly, the square. To this end he tries to interpolate all the mathematics known to him and, following the Roman Architect, draws one of the most celebrated drawings in the history of art. But his use of it comes to him from the architects who belong to the ancient vow of silence. He uses the same invisible Canon that governs the splendor of the beautiful, and that contains that Divine Luminitas of the pentalpha. And he studies one of the most important visual and aesthetic systems of antiquity, that of Proportion, which the Greeks called analogy (αναλογία), a concept which, as the roots of the word well express, means relation and logos. That is, Reason, first and last, as Kant would say, the Pater-Cronos, or epicyclic Saturn, which is ultimately the Episteme (ἐπιστήμη) of the Logos. Without delving into the antediluvian roots of number and proportion, the Logos manifests itself as a relatio between the invisible and the visible. That is, a relation between worlds, in all their senses and dimensions. This door that joins the celestial with the material, the sacred with the profane, is reduced to an irrational number that both the Egyptians and the Greeks knew, not by its arithmetic figure but by its geometry and by the hylomorphism (from the Greek Hyle [ὕλη], matter, and morphe [μορφή], form) that brings about that harmonic capacity between the carnal and the spiritual, between matter and form, an Aristotelian concept which medieval scholasticism restricted to the rank of order and figure. The language of this relation is mathematics, which, paraphrasing Plato, is Geometry, that is, the language of God. However, it is the architecture of the Middle Ages that keeps encrypted in its “Royal Art” the geometric and mystical aphorisms of the Golden Number, which I would dare to call Orphic, and in whose hermeticism the basic principles of creation are found. For every sacred work, before being built, was architectural thought, forged by a spirit whose entity permeates all the constructive and figurative resources that will make it possible. This spirit underlies not only what is built and materially ordered, but also fecundates the Soul, which is the giver of life, being capable of generating both the House of God and that of men, and building upon the face of the earth for the living as well as for the dead. And far from any modern definition, elusive of those attributes that would have architecture be functional and at the same time beautiful, or that place it halfway between the semiotic and the symbolic only to end up turning it into that absurd and peripatetic wink of the “machine for living” or “for dwelling”, architecture exists only if it is the emanation and materialization of the creative Word. And its hierophant, the architect, is, or rather was, a medium and dowser, heir to that priesthood that knew how to understand the forces of nature, working according to its laws, without dishonoring the order of the Mother goddess, Nature, and channeling the immense and poliorcetic forces that forge prime matter in its athanor. For to build is a thaumaturgic act and means “to create together”, that is, to “unite” the worlds. It is therefore, before being a science of matter, a prescience of the immaterial. And it is precisely the immaterial that fecundates it with that radiant aura that impels us wherever we encounter its works. Consider, for example, the cathedrals, the first conceived in the crossed, dual and angelic style of the Gothic. Gothic and, par excellence, Goetic, for it is the spirit that pushes matter to withdraw, opening itself to the Light and raising its watchtowers toward the heavens. Here too, and especially in the conception of the building’s initial layout, the golden number comes to embroider the master parts that are the symbolic structure of the act of foundation (Fig. 1-5-6). Saint-Denis, Chartres, Notre-Dame de Paris, Reims or Amiens, Cathedrals of victory over the chaos of duality, replace classical word and topology with Geometry, which is omniscient Light. And their masters, unknown operative masons, immersed in that spirit of scholasticism in which the Trivium and the Quadrivium organized not only worship but also the gaze of the excellent vitraux, those diamantine canvases, pregnant with the Color and Light of redemption, which seem to remind us of those words of Aristotle: “what matters is the work and not the craftsmen”