Symmetry in Renaissance Art

Abstract

Although many scholars suppose that the concept of bilateral symmetry was known in Classical times, the earliest evidence of it does not appear before the second half of the fifteenth century: it is a concept that originated in the Italian Renaissance. From the outset it was not only a descriptive concept but a normative one, which asserted that to be beautiful a design must be symmetric. The only person during the Renaissance known to have offered a rationale for this norm was L. B. Alberti, who claimed that Nature’s forms are symmetric and that the Ancients, recognizing as much, saw to it that their artifacts and buildings were always given symmetric shape. These claims (whether original to Alberti or not is unclear) would prove to be immensely influential and durable and are the origin, not only of the preponderance of symmetrical architecture, but of tenacious scientific fallacies such as the alleged symmetry of snowflakes and other crystals.