Published on Jul 30, 2024.

While reading this book, I was reminded of Leon Battista Alberti’s winged human eye. An eye that, as is well known, moves quickly, but also freely, between past, present, and future – specifically between analog and digital – precisely because it can recognize the reality of natural facts by overcoming the unreality of artificial fiction. And that, with its absolute disenchantment, is a prelude to Leonardo da Vinci’s eye when, in a famous passage of the Codex Arundel 263 (fol. 155 recto), he declares his «bramosa voglia»  to «vedere la gran copia delle varie e strane forme fatte dalla artifiziosa natura»  which pushes it to explore the depth of a «oscura spilonca»  to «vedere se là entro fusse qualche miracolosa cosa.»  confessing that mix of «paura e desiderio»  in the face of the unknown that circularly re-proposes the rhetorical question – «Quid Tum» – with whom Alberti seals his winged human eye and which also transpires from the book co-authored by Nicola Pisacane, Pasquale Argenziano and Alessandra Avella, which locks Drawing, Geometry and Design in a Borromean knot capable of revealing the humanistic face of the Mineralogical Sciences, prefiguring new ideational potential in the field of Jewellery Design.
But let's go in order.
The book is dedicated to the Drawing/Design of precious stones and has its roots in the educational field, as the authors state. It is divided into three chapters, accompanied by illustrations so eloquent as to return a sort of autonomous compendium.
In the first chapter – Crystals’ geometry in mineral and faceted gemstones – Nicola Pisacane goes far beyond the usual citation of the works of the great fifteenth-century treatises (from Piero della Francesca’s De quinque corporibus regularibus to Luca Pacioli’s Divina Proportione). He focuses his analyses on the later, less known but equally meaningful studies of Jean-Baptiste Romé de L’Isle, Abbot René Just Haüy, and Auguste Bravais, thus emphasizing with originality, as well as lucidity, the centrality of Geometry in the study of crystals and faceted gems.
In the second chapter – Crystallographic forms’ models, from tangible to digital – Alessandra Avella explores the concept of the model as a communicative artifact aimed at translating crystalline forms from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale, starting from the morphological crystallography of Jean-Baptiste Romé de L’Isle: an approach typical of historical pedagogical experiences (from the Pestalozzi method to the Montessori one, passing through the Bauhaus laboratory), but updated in a parametric key by prefiguring the compelling possibility of modeling ‘new’ crystals.
Finally, in the third chapter – The scientific representation of crystal polyhedra. Insights and methodological innovations (XVII-XX Centuries) – Pasquale Argenziano, highlights the synergistic interrelationships between the Parallel Projections for the study of crystals and faceted gemstones by René Just Haüy with the better-known ones by Gaspard Monge and William Farish, highlighting the theoretical acquisitions of Projective Geometry matured in the early Nineteenth Century in the French polytechnic milieu, and still other synergies with the theorization of crystallographic stereography pursued by Franz Ernst Neumann and William Hallowes Miller, extending the trigonometric foundations of cartography to the microscopic scale.
The book ends in the best possible way. Looking to the future, it opens the doors of research to JIM-Jewel Information Modeling, understood as a field of experimentation capable of combining parametric modeling with block-chain certification.
It could not have been otherwise; Because this book does not limit itself to reporting on a passionate and shared path of study and teaching – which would represent a qualifying fact in itself – but establishes new points of view, confirming the universal role of drawing-thought as a privileged eye for the recognition of “miraculous things”; even in only apparently unusual fields such as Mineralogy, Crystallography, and Gemology.
 
by Paolo Belardi

1 “eager desire” [Ed.]
2 “see the great copy of the various and strange forms made by artificial nature” [Ed.]
3 “dark cave” [Ed.]
4 “see if there was something miraculous in there.” [Ed.]
5 “fear and desire” [Ed.]