Skip to content
Culture & Religion —

Eye Candy

What do the Egyptian pyramids, the Mona Lisa and George Clooney’s face all have in common? The “golden ratio” according to The Independent writer Steve Connor.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

What do the Egyptian pyramids, the Mona Lisa and George Clooney’s face all have in common? The “golden ratio” according to The Independent writer Steve Connor. “The ancient Egyptian pyramids, the Parthenon of Athens, Mona Lisa’s face and the head of George Clooney all have one thing in common. Their attractiveness is said to be based on the ‘golden ratio’, which is supposed to be the most aesthetically pleasing shape to the human eye. The golden ratio, also known as the divine proportion, produces a shape similar to a widescreen television or a cinema screen and describes a rectangle with a length roughly one and half times its width. The proportion is said to pervade art, architecture and nature… Now a theoretical mathematician has come up with what he believes is a possible reason why the human eye finds shapes in these proportions so particularly appealing. It comes down to how easy it is for the eye and the brain to scan such an image for important details, based on our evolutionary history.”

Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
Related
A bearded man wearing glasses and a plaid shirt speaks with a microphone clipped to his collar in front of a purple background with white dots.
The Well
How Rainn Wilson discovered sacredness
The hospital where Rainn Wilson’s wife and son nearly died became his own personal holy site. There, he discovered that the sacred can exist in places we least expect it. During his talk at A Night of Awe and Wonder, he explained how the awe we feel in moments of courage and love is moral beauty — and following it might be the start of our spiritual revolution.
▸
13 min
—
with
Rainn Wilson
Up Next
Surprising Science
Happiness Rating
A new study, dubbed the “smiley scale”, has ranked each American state by happiness – revealing that dwellers of the Big Apple were the least, er smiley.