Nautilus

Provenance:
Paper Type: Legion Mulberry White #38 [Utrecht 19118]
Paper Size: 9.75" x 13"
Image Size: 4" x 5"
Edition Size: 50
Date: 2001-04-15
Inks Used: Van Son Rubber Based Black

   Nautilus  is the sole survivor of a group of organisms that once swarmed the hot seas of the Paleozoic Era. They dominated marine ecosystems and left fossils by the millions. Now this living fossil is restricted to a range from the Fiji Islands to the Straits of Malacca. Their shells are naturally buoyant, and the few that made their way to the Mediterranean were collected by the ancients as very powerful talismans. Pythagorean philosophers studied them as manifestations of the Golden Rectangle, where the ratio of the width to the height is 1 to ~1.6180. In the coiled logarithmic spiral of the shell, mathematicians envisioned the Fibonacci Sequence, a series of numbers 1,1,2,3,5,8,12,21,34, ... in which each number after 1 is the sum of the previous two numbers.
  The same proportions hold when Nature unfolds the rotation of leaves from the plant stem so that the same position is not used twice. Similarly in Nautilus  the internal partitions from one spiral to another align themselves the least frequently possible, leading to the most optimal strength of the shell. Scales of a pine cone spiraling upward, the internal arrangement within a sunflower, the spiral florettes on the exterior of a pineapple, all manifest the ratio of the Golden Rectangle. So do the pyramids of Egypt, the Parthenon, the five-pointed star of the necromancer, and many other expressions of human culture we have come to regard as "Perfect." lick here to edit.