Botticelli: The Birth of Venus (c. 1486) and Golden Rectangles, Droste Effect

Emerging from shell,
Goddess of love and beauty,
Botticelli's muse.

Successive Golden Rectangles dividing a Golden Rectangle into squares (logarithmic spiral known as the golden spiral)


Botticelli
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli or Il Botticello "The Little Barrel"; (c. 1445 - 1510) was an Italian painter of the Florentine school during the Early Renaissance. Source: Wikipedia, Sandro Botticelli.

The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli 
The Birth of Venus (in Italian: Nascita di Venere) is a painting by Sandro Botticelli. It depicts the goddess Venus, having emerged from the sea as a full grown woman, arriving at the sea-shore (which is related to the Venus Anadyomene motif). The painting is held in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Source: Wikipedia, The Birth of Venus (Botticelli).

Golden rectangle
A golden rectangle is a rectangle whose side lengths are in the golden ratio, one-to-phi, that is, approximately 1:1.618. A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle, that is, with the same proportions as the first. Square removal can be repeated infinitely, which leads to an approximation of the golden or Fibonacci spiral.

Droste Effect
The Droste effect is a specific kind of recursive picture, one that in heraldry is termed mise en abyme. An image exhibiting the Droste effect depicts a smaller version of itself in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. This smaller version then depicts an even smaller version of itself in the same place, and so on. Only in theory could this go on forever; practically, it continues only as long as the resolution of the picture allows, which is relatively short, since each iteration geometrically reduces the picture's size. It is a visual example of a strange loop, a self-referential system of instancing which is the cornerstone of fractal geometry. Source: Wikipedia, Droste Effect.
 

Boticelli: The Birth of Venus (c. 1486) and Golden Rectangles, Droste Effect

 

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