Sacred Geometry in Iconography
Introduction
Tonight we will discuss Geometry in Sacred Art, particularly in Iconography. This topic is often greatly underestimated, partly because it is normally difficult to speak of sacred art in the proper sense of the term. Often we speak of art with religious subjects, but rarely do we refer to sacred art itself. Indeed, there is a difference between profane art, which in the artist's purpose aims to express himself or his concept in order to concretize, externalize and crystallize an aesthetic emotion of various kinds. In this case, the purpose and end of art is art itself. The terms may vary slightly, but in general the artist who dedicates himself totally to his art, conceives his work and undergoes a sometimes months-long struggle until he manages to express and crystallize his experience. Once this is done, the struggle is concluded and progressively the artist detaches himself from the artwork, often even dissatisfied and ready to proceed to another work. In this case, therefore, Art is an end. The artist's purpose is the production of an artwork that somehow conveys himself or rather one of his aesthetic activities. In this sense the artist travels in absolute freedom and has as his only criterion his own aesthetic taste. Conversely, in the case of Sacred Art, Art is a means, a path that the artist uses first of all to operate an inner transmutation in himself and subsequently to operate it in others. The purpose of sacred art, therefore, is to put man in communication with the divine and awaken him to the reality of the spirit. Artistic activity in sacred art is centered on harmonizing and binding the artistic work to the spiritual world on one hand and making it act on the material world on the other. In this case the aesthetic problem is important (certainly) but takes second place to the primary problem of structuring an artwork in a way coherent with the metaphysical reality or spiritual experience lived by the artist. Therefore there are a series of things that change perspective. For example, it might seem better to make a realistic portrait, with a certain perspective, almost photographic. But actually for this purpose no, because what one wants to represent is not a material reality of this world, but a spiritual reality and therefore one must structure the entire composition so that it is coherent with this spiritual reality. The material aspect is irrelevant because the icon is as if it were a temple, a sacred place that is in harmony with the Archetypal Cosmos, the essential model of the Cosmos, an ideal model, devoid of form, but in which live the spiritual Essences that the Initiate must assimilate.
Icon as Temple and Spiritual Transmutation (Mandala)
To understand this difference well, I had thought of presenting you with an example of sacred art. But since very often seeing objectively what is distant from us is much easier than seeing what we have before our eyes every day, I had thought of using as an example that of Eastern iconography of mandalas. This form of sacred art has many analogies with classical iconography and also with archeosophical iconography and therefore can serve as an introduction to the subject although archeosophical iconography as we will see is much more advanced by virtue of the fact that we live in a much more advanced time from a scientific and technological point of view compared to that of the Tibetans of the 15th century. But let's say it can be useful as an introduction. First, I don't know if you have ever heard of Mandalas. Generally they greatly capture the attention of the Western public because they are paintings generally made of sand to which a particular rite is associated and for which they take weeks to realize this icon and - once finished and the rite celebrated - they disperse it, for example the sand is dissolved in a nearby river and thus returned to the earth. So it has been interpreted by Westerners as a symbol of the ephemeral and the transitoriness of life, but this is not so, the matter is much deeper. First of all, one must understand that the artwork in question, the mandala is part of a complex ritual that must, as a result, make the neophyte exit from the state of samsara, that is, of incompleteness and continuous becoming, and make him enter the nirvanic world, the kingdom in which beings who are filled with Wisdom, Power and Love are found. Therefore the construction or drawing of a mandala is an initiatory process and a journey of transformation and realization of the individual, after which the means, having become useless, is dispersed. It was a true journey because in this temple the individual moved, received objects, blessings, in a mixture of scents, perfumes, colors, that were meant to facilitate interior processes of awakening to spiritual reality. The purpose precisely was to use the power of the symbol to dynamize interior processes in the individual. In a state of cultivated strong receptivity, the initiate was stimulated with colors and symbols, associated with visualizations in such a way as to help him in his awakening process. Every figure, every color, every symbol in these drawings that you see represents a spiritual force to be awakened and a power to be assimilated. Everything has its correspondence with an interior operation to be done. What then is a Mandala in synthesis? A refined definition is provided by the orientalist Giuseppe Tucci, Knight of the Grand Cross of the Italian Republic.