3. Her Majesty Symmetry

It was a long time since I blogged here. Today I'd like to present a few thoughts that will influence most further discussions. 

Studies analyzing the movements of human eye looking at an image show that if an image contains simple lines or regular geometric shapes, the eye is attracted to them immediately. It looks like the brain automatically recognizes the shapes and human eye gets focused on these features. The same is true for images containing reflections in water and mirrors, or parts that are repeated in an organized way. These images represent the most universal way of organizing things: symmetry.
Traditional thinking of symmetry usually recognizes reflection symmetry (mirrors) or rotational symmetry (regular geometric shapes and flowers). But a very simple and powerful type of symmetry is the so-called translational symmetry, which is encountered in many images. This kind of symmetry reveals itself when objects of the same shape are located at the same distance along a line (a fence, a colonnade, a row of bricks, parallel lines). Even a text can provide an example of translational symmetry:
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text.

One more kind of symmetry that is not often recognized as a symmetry is proportion. To understand this, one needs to embrace the mathematical notion of symmetry. An object is symmetric with respect to a given operation (transformation) if it preserves some property. Thus, if we increase the size of a rectangle in such a way that the ratio of the large and small sides of it stays the same, the enlarged rectangle will be symmetrical to the original. Therefore, all ancient works related to architectural proportions are about symmetry in contemporary mathematical sense! Interestingly, ancient Greeks and Vitruvius used the word Symmetry to denote the satisfying arrangement of a balanced distribution of the elements of a whole (in other words, right proportions).

This said, the Symmetry becomes a very powerful concept uniting many properties of images that are attractive to a human eye. We will see further that many so-called compositional rules in visual arts can be derived from the notion of Symmetry as briefly discussed here.
Symmetry also plays a profound role in history, religion, science and culture, including visual, musical and literary arts. Some of these relations will be discussed further in this blog.