Measure, Mind and Mathematics: The Closing Symposium of De Humana Mensura

Venue: Palazzo della Cancelleria, Rome

Date: 16 January 2026

A few days before De Humana Mensura closed at the Palazzo della Cancelleria, the Sala Vasari hosted a symposium that made explicit what the exhibition had been arguing all along: that Linda Karshan’s practice belongs as much to the history of ideas as to the history of drawing.

Three speakers approached the same body of work from three different disciplines. His Excellency Marco Salvi, Bishop of Civita Castellana, returned to the Renaissance terrain he had opened at the exhibition’s launch a month earlier, this time setting the perspectival thinking of Piero della Francesca alongside that of Luca Pacioli — mathematician, friar, and author of De Divina Proportione — as two faces of a single conviction that harmony, balance and the golden proportion were not aesthetic preferences but descriptions of how the world is actually put together.

Alexis Nanavaty, of the Courtauld Institute, drew the line forward from Pacioli’s century to Karshan’s own studio practice, tracing suggestive parallels between her rhythmic, counted method of mark-making and Leonardo da Vinci’s lifelong pursuit of a universal system of proportion — the same territory the artist herself has long claimed as her own. Where Leonardo diagrammed the body as a system of measurable ratios, Karshan’s drawings record proportion as it is lived: performed in real time, breath by breath, rather than calculated after the fact.

The most unexpected contribution came from Luca Caldironi, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who turned the discussion toward the Fibonacci sequence and its quiet presence in Karshan’s compositions, reading her grids and spirals through the lens of psychodynamics rather than art history. It was a reminder that the numerical order Karshan works within is not only a Renaissance inheritance but also, potentially, a structure with something to say about how the mind organises experience — an angle entirely at home with Karshan’s own academic background in humanistic psychology.

Taken together, the three papers resisted any single account of what Karshan’s drawings are “about.” They are, at once, a continuation of a Renaissance mathematical tradition, a case study in how proportion migrates from Leonardo’s notebooks into a living body four centuries later, and a possible object lesson for psychoanalysis. For an exhibition staged in the closing weeks of the Jubilee Year of Hope, in a palazzo built to embody the very humanism under discussion, it was a fitting way to send the show off: not with a summary, but with three further doors left open.