Our conception of
science now, towards the end of the t21st century, has changed
radically. Now we see science as a description and explanation of
the underlying structures of nature; and words like structure,
pattern, plan, arrangement, architecture constantly occur in every
description that we try to make. We talk about the way crystals are
put together, the way atoms are made of their parts -above all we
talk about the way that living molecules are made of their parts.
The spiral structure of DNA has become the most vivid image of
science in the last years.
Architects took a
dead heap of stones, which is not a cathedral, and they turned it
into a cathedral by exploiting the natural forces of gravity, the
way the stone is laid naturally in its bedding planes, the
brilliant invention of the flying buttress and arch and so on. And
they created a structure that grew out of the analysis of nature
into this superb synthesis. The kind of man who is interested in
the architecture of nature today is the kind of man who made this
architecture nearly eight hundred years ago. There is one gift
above all others that makes man unique among the animals, and it is
the gift displayed everywhere here: his immense pleasure in
exercising and pushing forward his own skill.
A popular cliche in
philosophy says that science is pure analysis or reductionism, like
taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis, putting
the rainbow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by
analysing nature. Michelangelo said that vividly, by implication,
in his sculpture (it is particularly clear in the sculptures that
he did not finish), and he also said it explicitly in his sonnets
on the act of creation.
When that which is divine in us doth try
To shape a face, both brain and hand unite
To give, from a mere model frail and
slight,
Life to the stone by Art's free energy.
'Brain and hand
unite': the material asserts itself through the hand, and thereby
prefigures the shape of the work for the brain. The sculptor, as
much as the mason, feels for the form within nature, and for him it
is already laid down there. That principle is
constant.
The best of artists hath no thought to show
Which the rough stone in its superfluous
shell
Doth not include: to break the marble spell
Is all the hand that serves the brain can
do.
A deeper meaning is
added by ordinary people to provide the imagery lives in arches and
beams.
