The Passionate Triangle

As the title suggests, Professor Zorach is passionate about triangles in the intellectual, theological, philosophical, and visual culture of early modern Europe.Theological concepts like the Trinity were rendered as triangles during this period, and, as we know so well, the triangle shaped theories of vision in relation to linear perspective.This book makes explicit the link between mathematical thinking and the expression of abstract relationships within Christianity.Zorach lays out the terrain using a broad brush, uniting triangular excursions across social, theological, and phenomenological subjectivities.She sets out the general parameters of her study in the introductory chapter, "The Passionate Triangle." Chapter 2 reviews the key tenets of art historical thinking, Renaissance and modern, on theories of perspective in European visual culture before 1450.This chapter makes a convincing argument for the close linkage between the social world of Renaissance artists and their cultural formation in practical geometrical studies.She demonstrates that an artist and theorist like Leon Battista Alberti embraced circumscription, a concept that regulated the correct placement and mathematical measurement of objects, all the while creating powerful fictive illusions of visual reality.The next two chapters focus on the different ways in which the triangle was used to express spiritual geometry.Chapter 3 discusses representations of religious scenes, such as the Annunciation, where a triangular relationship is established between the Virgin Mary, Gabriel, and God the Father, or the familiar image of the three-fold nature of the Christian godhead in the Trinity.Major religious thinkers such as Augustine and Nicholas of Cusa are considered here in relation to the symbolic work of the triangle.Zorach also considers the Trinitarian diagrams created by the sixteenth-century theologian-mathematician Charles de Bovelles.Her classification of diagrams as anti-naturalistic (65) needs further elaboration, given the complexity of epistemic functions and processes evidenced in late medieval and early modern diagrammatic imagery.Chapter 4 evaluates the important role of the triangular compositional arrangement in Renaissance tavole quadrate.Zorach argues for the symbolic use of geometry in many fifteenth-century altarpieces.She also suggests that

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