Guide to musical Grid. This post is in two parts the second follows the first set of figures.

Dear students, I am apt to write this description of a musical grid like a geometry problem which may frighten some of you who think composition should come directly from the soul or guided by the invisible hand of a muse. But lets agree that we respond to certain proportions with pleasure, whether they are a baby’s face, a flower, a building or a painting. you would agree that the arrangement of a pretty face can be diagramed, and the diagram can then be used to draw a similar face. One way of planning pleasing relationships in a painting is by plotting one of Alberti’s musical ratios. Alberti’s grids have for six hundred years aided artists to plan the underpinning of their paintings.

I am not going into the history behind these grids but herewith simply guide you in constructing one. In the end the grid is not visible, but your shapes are seen guided harmonically by an unseen force, just as the eyes in a pretty face align halfway between the top of the skull and the chin.

To begin you have a rectangular surface, your picture plane on which you want to make an image with shapes, colors and movements. You want to guide the viewers eyes over the surface of your picture plane at a rhythm that will cause an emotional response. 

·      Your rectangle has two equally long sides and two equally short sides, four sides in all.

·      Divide each side into 16 segments, the top, bottom, left and right.

·      Mark the upper left corner “16 “ as well as the lower right corner.

·      Mark the upper right corner 0 (zero), as well as the lower left. 

·      Plot points at segments 9 and 12 on the perimeter of your rectangle.

·      Now if every side has 0, 9, 12, and 16 plotted you have twelve points (Fig. A).

·      Draw a straight line connecting every one of these twelve points to each other (Fig. B).

·      To check your accuracy make sure you have five lines emanating from each corner and eight lines radiating from each 9 and 12 points; every point being connected to all other points by a line (Fig. C). 

Here is a preface to Charles Bouleau’s wonderful book titled Painter’s Secret Geometry, written by Jacques Villon. Villon was an interesting artist and the brother of Marcel Duchamp.

In the artistic chaos  of these last years, when the absolute liberation  of the individual instinct has  brought  it  to  the  point  of  frenzy, an attempt to identify the harmonic disciplines that have  secretly,  in  every  period,  served as foundations for painting might well seem folly.

But this folly is in fact wisdom. It is the way to a kind of knowledge essential for whoever wants to paint. Essential, too, for whoever wants to look at pictures. The framework of a work of art is also its most  secret and its deepest poetry.

But this study–so important that it is  strange  it  should  have  been left so long unattempted–was not an easy undertaking. It is a dangerous quest, one in which the seeker's mind must be always on guard against itself. Charles Bouleau has had need of a great deal of humility; he has taught himself to abandon many of his initial ideas, to renounce various seductive hypotheses that had given this or that branch of his researches its first  direction,  in his  determination always to  be  true to the reality of the work of art before him.

The aesthetic theories which he expounds in this book are never arbitrary ones. They are those of the period under discussion:  they  have  always a firm historical basis. Charles Bouleau does not single any of them out for partisanship. Advancing step by step through the vast mass of work produced by the painters, he has had the skill to separate out the new contribution of each period and each artist. He has carried his analysis through with strict method, seeking, in the case of each work studied, to recreate the intellectual atmosphere of its time.

The result of such long and scrupulous reflection is a book that is often highly original. Though, for example, numerous writers before him have discussed the golden number, Charles Bouleau's study of the Renaissance use of musical proportions in the composition of pictures will come as a revelation to many readers.

In a word, this book goes a long way toward recovering the spirit of geometry as Piero della Francesca understood it; it is an attempt to reveal that secret geometry in a painting, which has been for the artists of every period one of the essential components of beauty; and the examples which the author offers from among the works of modern painters, of Mondrian for instance, are a striking proof of his objectivity.

Jacques Villon.

 H.W. 

A. Using the 9-12-16 formula above, print and grid the central panel of Peter Paul Reuben’s paintings:  The Elevation of the Cross. 1610-1611. Oil on panel.  You can also draw the grid for the entire altarpiece by reversing the grid, with zero in the upper left and lower right and sixteen plotted at the lower left and upper right.

B. Sketch the dark areas. How do they align with the grid?

C. Sketch the dark movements for your own possible artwork using the same grid.

Please add your comments, questions, and artwork.