Il geomètra e l'imago al cerchio. Il sacro in Dante e Gaudí e le formule matematiche dell'Amore (Il geomètra e l'imago al cerchio.The Sacred in Dante and Gaudí and the Mathematical Formulas of Love)

Title: Il geomètra e l’imago al cerchio. Il sacro in Dante e Gaudí e le formule matematiche dell’Amore (Il geomètra e l’imago al cerchio.The Sacred in Dante and Gaudí and the Mathematical Formulas of Love)

pp. 67–86
Author : Carla Rossi, Chair ISFiDa (ORCID: 0000-0001-6557-3684)

Abstract: The paper, presented at the conference The Sense of the Sacred in Dante and Gaudí, analyses the intersection between Dante’s cosmology and Gaudí’s spatial vision, following as a guiding thread the theme of the cognitive limit implicit in the quadratura del cerchio—the mathematical problem central to the Middle Ages—and the tension between Euclidean geometry and Dante’s poetic intuition of a curved, non-Euclidean space. It offers a comparative reading of Dante and Gaudí as thinkers of the sacred, for whom geometry is transformed from a rational tool into a theophanic space, and the failure of Euclidean measure becomes the very condition of vision. Dante’s poetic universe thus foreshadows, by analogy, the architectural forms of Antoni Gaudí. The analysis engages with the interpretations of Pavel Florensky, Mark Peterson, and Marco Bersanelli, who identified in the Commedia a cosmological conception akin to the model of the three-sphere later formalised by Riemann and Einstein. Within this framework lies the reflection on Gaudí, who, in the non-Euclidean forms of the Sagrada Família, translates into architectural space the same Dantesque tension between the human and the divine.