It is not generally suspected how much the above pronouncement of Plato—or in a more general way, his conception of Aesthetics—has influenced European (or, let us say, Western) Thought and Art, especially Architecture. In the same way that Plato conceived the “Great Ordering One” (or “the One ordering with Art,”) as arranging the Cosmos harmoniously according to the preexisting, eternal, paradigma, archetypes or ideas, so the Platonic — or rather, neo-Platonic—view of Art conceived the Artist as planning his work of Art according to a preexisting system of proportions, as a “symphonic” composition, ruled by a “dynamic symmetry” corresponding in space to musical eurhythmy in time. This technique of correlated proportions was in fact transposed from the Pythagorean conception of musical harmony: the intervals between notes being measured by the lengths of the strings of the lyra, not by the frequencies of the tones (but the result is the same, as length and numbers of vibrations are inversely proportional), so that the chords produce comparisons or combinations of ratios, that is, systems of proportions.
