Ancient architects and artists had a way of striking resonant chords in those who viewed of their work. However, this skill seems to have disappeared. Beauty Memory Unity points toward a possibility of regaining a new sense of unity in the visual arts through a combination of theoretical ideas and practical methods, of narrative description and visual exercises.Proportion鈥攖he use of number and geometry as the tools of design鈥攊s seen in the context of the search for the Beautiful, a state the soul achieves when one recognizes the phenomenon of unity. From the theoretical symbolic mathematics of the Pythagoreans, Platonists, and Neo-Platonists, Steve Bass proposes an aesthetic theory鈥攁 way of approaching beauty鈥攔ooted in the idea of psyche, expressed through the ancient arts and sciences of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
Concepts are illustrated step by step as they apply to the elements and the archetypal compositions of classical architecture, such as the order and portico, using arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic ratio methods.