From John Robb to Jean Paul Gaultier

— thus, many arches build to a pyramid:

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Of course, with arches one has to be very circumspect, buecause in rich contexts, they’re not simple creatures:

Among the greatest such arches I know are Taniyama‘s 1955 “surmise” as Barry Mazur puts it, that “every elliptic equation is associated with a modular form” — arching way above my pay grade — an insight that was to bear rich fruit forty years later, in Andrew Wiles‘ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem; and Erwin Panofsky‘s great book similarly linking the structures of medieval cathedrals and scholastic thought:

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White we’re on the topic of gothic iconography, another form of arch we might consider is the vesica piscis:

— frequently found in medieval art and architecture:

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I’m not suggesting, John, that your inquiry and mine are identical — far from it — but that they have a sufficiently rich overlap that an appreciation of one is likely to spark insight in terms of the other.

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