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Persian gardens, proportion, and Plato’s Timaeus

Reza Tehrani Fellow
· 4 replies
Beauty & artGreek & RomanPersianPlato#beauty#proportion
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The classical Persian garden, the chahar bagh, is divided into four parts by water channels meeting at a centre. Visit the Fin Garden in Kashan or Bagh-e Eram in Shiraz and you feel the order before you understand it.

In the Timaeus, Plato's craftsman god shapes the world according to mathematical proportion, assigns regular solids to the elements (the tetrahedron to fire, the cube to earth, the octahedron to air, the icosahedron to water), and makes the cosmos as beautiful as possible.

As an architect, I wonder: is beauty really proportion? The Persian garden suggests it's something more: proportion plus shade, water sound, scent, the way you move through it. Plato would say those are mere sense pleasures. Would he be right?

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4 replies

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    Plato isn't consistent on this. In the Philebus, pure pleasures include the pleasure of pure colours and sounds and simple geometric shapes. So he allows some sensuous beauty, provided it's "pure" and unmixed with pain. Your garden's water sound might qualify.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Kavya Menon

    Fellow

    Indian aesthetics would say the garden is about rasa, the emotional flavour savoured by a sensitive viewer. Proportion is a means, not the point. Gardens in Sanskrit poetry are always places of longing or love.

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  3. Vikram Sethi

    Fellow

    A small mathematician's warning: many claims about the golden ratio in buildings and gardens are exaggerated. Measure the Parthenon carefully and you can find almost any ratio you want. Proportion matters, but beware of numerology.

    1. Reza Tehrani

      Fellow

      Vikram, I agree, and architects are worse offenders than anyone. But the proportions I'm thinking of are simpler: symmetry, repetition, the four-fold division. Those are real and the visitor feels them.

      Helpful · 1