5. CRIOS

The presence of a regular scheme always has a meaning.
(W. W. Sawyer, Prelude to Mathematics)

Surgical modelling of the facial profile, just like cutting a rough gemstone to produce a gem, consists in following a geometrical scheme. And the cephalometrics of the profile is reminiscent of the angular symmetry of a precious stone, more precisely the brilliant cut seen in profile, which repeats the three-dimensional order of the diamond.

F.P. Ramsey, English mathematician, philosopher and economist of the early 20th century, showed that we can amuse ourselves by drawing lines in all situations, and thus discover that a geometrical figure always results.

Every shape and situation of creation contains its own geometrical scheme. The soft jellyfish, the hard diamond, a pile of pebbles or a group of stars, the combinations wagered in playing poker during a year, handshakes between strangers, can all be translated into geometrical configurations.

Physicists and mathematicians say that "living organisms have an extraordinary capability to give order to the surrounding environment" (1), and that "chaos possesses an underlying geometrical shape" (2).

The search for repeated schemes, for mathematical correspondences, is inherent in all disciplines of the knowable and in the search for order, symmetry and a hierarchy in the body-mind and in space-time: this is a subject evoked by thinkers of all ages and nations.

Seneca (4 BC - 65 AD), Balzac (1799-1850) and Nietzsche (1844-1900) - dissimilar men from dissimilar ages -- all recognised geometrical consistencies typical of crystals (solids made up of atoms in a regular structure) in the unity of body and mind.

Seneca wrote: "In all contingencies of life, you have something incorruptible inside you, like a diamond axis around which the evil facts of daily life revolve"; Balzac said that "the physiognomic rules are precise"; Nietzsche invited us to "slowly harden ourselves like a precious stone, so that in the end we remain quietly immobile for eternity" (3).

Symmetry, as an application of measurement (symmetry derives from the Greek syn, together, and métron, measure) enables us to achieve defensive measures and tools for interpretation. With it we do not want to eliminate the asymmetrical or soft things from the world -- as those who don't like oysters will hope -- nor to reduce human beings to monoliths, but rather to reconcile the concave with the convex (as Canova did), the hard with the soft (oysters have shells), black with the white (a chessboard).

The man in the street always, instinctively, bends before the absolute, whether it is absolutely beautiful or absolutely ugly (4).

Note 1. E. Schrondinger, What is life?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1946.

Note 2. Theory of deterministic chaos.

Note 3. The transformation of the body into a diamond is also the goal sought by the alchemy of Buddhist tantrism, known as Vajrayama, which means "vehicle of the diamond".

Note 4. Piero Manzoni (1934-1963) in an aesthetic work that is still talked about, sealed his excrement into a tin box, thus sanctioning the synthesis between bodily and industrial production, between soft and hard, septic and aseptic, definitively discouraging spectators from the habit of touching art works with their hands.