Chapter 5 From Text to Building: the Impact of the Timaeus on the Discipline of Architecture in Later Antiquity

In: The Legacy of Plato's Timaeus
Author:
Edmund Thomas
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Chapter
Pages:
134–164
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004705838_006

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Abstract

The legacy of Plato’s Timaeus in later antiquity and the early Middle Ages has generally been explored with reference to philosophical and theological traditions. Yet the text’s paradigm of a world created by a demiurge applying specific mathematical ratios invites the image of a master builder designing an architectural work. Scholars of later periods have started to investigate its impact on architects and designers, but there has been little discussion of its inspiration for Greek and Roman architecture. While architectural analogies were readily absorbed in philosophical versions and interpretations of Plato’s text, actual architects seem to have been slow to pick up on the potential application of this paradigm to their own work. This chapter explores the work of Aelius Nicon, an architect of the second century CE at Pergamon and father of the medical writer Galen. Nicon used his training in the mathematical sciences, especially in geometry and astronomy, to develop mathematical theories of number and shape based upon later interpretations of the Timaeus and to show alignments between his own architecture and the creation of the natural world. It also indicates how Nicon’s theories were themselves appropriated by a sixth-century Neoplatonist thinker adapting the tradition of the Timaeus in a Christian context.

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The Legacy of Plato's Timaeus

Cosmology, Music, Medicine, and Architecture from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century

Series:  Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, Volume: 353
Cover The Legacy of Plato's <i>Timaeus</i>
E-Book ISBN:
9789004705838
Publisher:
Brill
Print Publication Date:
16 Dec 2024
Front Matter
Chapter 1 Introduction: from Plato’s Text to the Beginnings of Modern Science – towards a New Understanding of the Disciplinary Inheritance of Plato’s Timaeus
Part 1 The Timaeus and its Reception in Late Antiquity
Part 2 The Medieval Timaeus
Part 3 The Timaeus in the Renaissance
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