In this image, Dr. Faile is checking out a little girl he is about to operate on. She had a large growth on the back of her head and he was figuring out how he was going to go about removing it.
I really like the composition of this image because it (loosely) uses the golden ratio. I won’t go too much into the ancient history of the golden ratio and how it applies to math, art, and religion. However, to summarize, it has long been agreed that the golden ratio is aesthetically pleasing and artists have often incorporated it in their works. During the Renaissance, Fra Pacioli published a book about the golden ratio called “The Divine Proportion”. In it he gave five reasons why the ratio is “divine”:
- As God, it is unique.
- As the Holy Trinity it consists in the unity in three, being made of three terms.
- As God can not be defined in words, it can not be expressed in a rational number.
- As God, it is always equal to itself.
- As there are four elements, which form all of nature, so the golden ratio permits the construction of the Dodecahedron, the expression of quintessence
All that to say that the golden ratio is very special and it provides us with the golden spiral which fits the composition of this photo. Click on the image to the right to see it with the spiral overlayed.
Finally, here is a bonus link to Jym Davis’ Revelation blog. He has illustrated the entire book of the Bible and has used the golden rectangle in the works.