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Show FOOTNOTES Preface quotes: Alfred North Whitehead THE AIMS OF EDUCATION (Macmillian 1959 New York) pg 2 3 I found the Da Vinci quote in Thomas Craven's MEN OF ART. I could not find the original source. It is buried somewhere in Leonardo's notebooks 1 ) Matthew 6, 28-30 When Matthew wrote this statement made by his teacher he left us a scripture that has been misinterpreted for centuries. Christ simply made an off the cuff remark about architecture. Referring to Solomon's "glory" Christ certainly must have been including the king's temple. Why the comparison with nature and buildings if he wasn't pointing to the difference between the two. He simply said that the order of man is not at all like that of nature. This scripture has nothing to do with any comparison of nature with our clothing. Christ could have delivered a lecture on continumorphic space but at this early stage on the planet such instruction would have been incomprehensible. How could he have talked about space before even the Greek mathematician Euclid had arrived before geometry had been invented. There was no perception of nature at ail in Christ's day. Nature was unseen unheard of and is just now beginning to emerge in the consciousness of man. It's time now for Solomon and the lilies to come together. This interpretation is further argued by the word "arrayed" which has to do with the idea of space. Certainly Egyptian architecture was not arrayed like anything natural. Christ constantly spoke in parallelism and metaphor jumping from context to context suddenly without notice. This scripture is an example of an awkward context the kind of thing that left his followers constantly puzzled as to what he was really trying to say. My interpretation though is taken out of context and looked at simply as a comment on man's relationship to nature. Actually the scripture has no context it was simply dropped into Christ's rambling discourse. And yet just preceding the reference to the "lilies" Christ said "...why take ye thought for raiment?" And then as if to say that the lilies need nothing more than self sufficiency don't worry about your own welfare simply follow "the way." On the contrary it is not clothing Christ is talking about here it is architecture. Christ draws nearer his thought when next He says "Wherefore, if God so clothe you the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven..." Now we have "grass" to think about. Grass and lilies have to do with spacial order. For me the architectural interpretation is a more logical analogy and lays the foundations for continumorphic space. -90- |
