PORCELAINia
LEONARDO DA VINCI SERIES
The Leonardo da Vinci Series memorializes in porcelain the divine shape of the truncated icosahedron and the Golden Proportion which imbues it with its symmetry. The divine symmetry of the truncated icosahedron has unified the minds of both artists and scientists in history. With its topology of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons, the truncated icosahedron is the perfectly symmetrical 3-dimensional embodiment of 5-fold symmetry whose mathematical basis is the Golden Mean. The picture above is of the very first latticework rendition of the truncated icosahedron drawn by Leonardo da Vinci in 1509 for Fra Luca Pacioli's "De Divina Porportione," a treatise on sacred geometry of the divine porportion. Leonardo in fact did all of the sketches for this wonderful treatise.
According to biophysicist and fullerene researcher Djuro Koruga, "The Law of Golden section is the basic law of Nature, because it gives the most harmonious relation among the elements of Nature and also their relation toward Nature on the whole." Four great figures in history are identified with the Golden Mean: the mathematician Leonardo Pisano Fibonnaci who identified its mathematical series (known as the "Fibonacci series"), the artist Piero della Francesca who applied it first to art in his geometric perspective, the mathematician/geometer Fra Luca Pacioli who devoted a treatise to its virtues, and Leonardo da Vinci who illustrated this Pacioli treatise and memorialized the sheer elegance of the Golden Mean in many of his masterworks.
This is the second of two Porcelainia series celebrating the works of two great Renaissance men, Buckminster Fuller and Leonardo da Vinci, artist/scientists who are linked in spirit and separated only through time. The amazing chemical element, buckminsterfullerene and its biological sister, clathrin, share a mysterious elemental strength and flexibility in their icosahedral symmetry. The unification of both in the future of biotechnology and nanotechnology are now being studied by Stuart Hameroff, Roger Penrose, Djuro Koruga, Richard Smalley and a host of others.
