Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophies and the Visual Arts examines philosophical structures of Plato in their structural, spatial, and architectonic implications. It examines elements of Plato's philosophical systems in relation to other philosophical systems, including those of Anaximander, Plotinus, Proclus, Nicolas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. It also examines Plato's philosophy in relation to architectonic conceptions in the arts, including the work of Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca in the Renaissance, Paul Cezanne, and the Cubists and Deconstructivists in the twentieth century. Platonic Architectonics presents new interpretations of philosophical texts, artistic treatises, and works of art and architecture in Western culture as they are interrelated and related to Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophical structures. It demonstrates the importance of philosophy in the production of the visual arts throughout history and the importance of the relation between the work of art and the philosophical text and artistic treatise.
Keywords: Plato (Timaeus, Republic, Laws, Phaedrus, Phaedo, Parmenides, Philebus), Socrates, art architecture, philosophy, cosmology, Neoplatonism, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Aristotle (De caelo, Physics, Metaphysics), Anaximander, Pythagoras, Simplicius (Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics), Hyppolytus (Refutatio), Pseudo-Plutarch (Stromata), Plotinus (Enneads), Reason Principle, Intellectual Principle, Proclus (On Euclid, Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements), Byzantine, Nicolas Cusanus (De circuli quadratura, De coniecturis, De docta ignorantia), Marsilio Ficino (De amore, Opera Omnia, Five Questions Concerning the Mind, Theologia Plastonica), Platonic Academy, Renaissance, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Oration on the Dignity of Man), Georges Bataille, Leon Battista Alberti (De re aedificatoria, De pictura, Palazzo Rucellai, Santa Maria Novella), Florence, Piero della Francesca (Legend of the True Cross, Flagellation, De prospectiva pingendi, Trattato d’abaco, Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus), Francesco di Giorgio, Paul Cézanne (The Village of Gardanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire), Cubism, Pablo Picasso (Man with a Violin, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky, Deconstructivism, Leonardo da Vinci (Vitruvian Man), Alessandro Botticelli (Birth of Venus), Luca Pacioli (De divina proportione), Giuseppe Terragni (Casa Giuliani-Frigerio), Bernard Tschumi (Parc de la Villette), Peter Eisenman (Chora L Works), Jacques Derrida (Writing and Difference), différance, chôra, apeiron, archê, Vitruvius (De architectura), Jacques Lacan (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis), Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams, Totem and Taboo), Pseudo-Dionysius (Celestial Hierarchy, Mystical Theology, Divine Names), Negative Theology, Rudolf Wittkower (Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism), Erwin Panofsky (Studies in Iconology, Perspective as Symbolic Form), Giorgio Vasari (Lives of the Artists), concinnitas, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica), Euclid (Elements of Geometry), Joachim Gasquet (Conversations with Cézanne), Roger Fry, Emile Bernard, Guillaume Apollinaire (Les Peintres cubists), Georges Braque, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Maurice Raynal, Léon Werth, Léonce Rosenberg, Gyorgy Kepes (Language of Vision), Le Corbusier (Villa Stein), Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics), Noam Chomsky (Syntactic Structures, Language and Mind, Cartesian Linguistics, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax), William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity), Sanford Kwinter, Catastrophe Theor
