Blake earlier than Blake, Hilma earlier than Hilma.
By Maria Popova
In 1543 — the 12 months Copernicus revealed his revolutionary treatise on the heliocentric universe and promptly died — the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda (c. 1517–June 19, 1585) started engaged on a sequence of mystical work, which might devour the following three many years of his life, finally culminating in his ebook De Aetatibus Mundi Imagines: Photographs of the Ages of the World.
Francisco was solely twenty when he turned an expert illuminator of spiritual manuscripts, following in his father’s footsteps. By thirty, he had studied with Michelangelo in Italy.
It was throughout that interval, as he was discovering his creative voice and non secular footing, that he started engaged on his work exploring the connection between the human and the divine.
Regardless of his heavy immersion within the figurative aesthetic of the Renaissance, he punctuated his extra conventional spiritual work with parts of geometry and astronomy that lent his artwork a spirit of the long run. He was Blake earlier than Blake and Hilma af Klint earlier than Hilma af Klint, 1 / 4 millennium forward.
Permeating his work and his writings is an obsession with symmetry — symmetry as proof of the perfection of God, an epoch earlier than Emmy Noether illuminated the perfection of mathematics, consonant along with his modern Galileo’s insistence that “arithmetic is the language with which God has written the universe.”
Complement with the stunning astronomical art of the Seventeenth-century self-taught German artist and astronomer Maria Clara Eimmart and poet A. Van Jordan’s love letter to symmetry and our search for meaning, then revisit the story of how William Blake attained his unexampled vision.
