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Discovering Pythagoras

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Discovering Pythagoras  

   

 

Visit the Pythagoras Foundation

 

In this one-hour documentary, hosted by the author of Measuring Heaven, internationally known scholar Professor Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier will accompany us in a visual discovery of how the ideas of a single man, who lived in Southern Italy long ago, were transformed into concepts that continue to inform our lives, even in our everyday lives in Philadelphia today.

 

Throughout the hour, American INSIGHT will demonstrate how Pythagoras’ influence became ever greater through time as the known facts of his life gave way to an extraordinary array of legends.  These legends were to influence not only ancient thinkers, but, perhaps even more so, Christian thinkers including St. Augustine, St. Jerome, Petrarch, Dante, Ficino, Erasmus, Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, and Kepler.  It presents, in visual form, the setting where Pythagoras lived and taught and follows the diversified thread of his ideas of a divinely ordered universe as they developed in Art and Architecture from ancient to modern times.

 

Using advance digital technologies and multimedia techniques, American INSIGHT features Professor Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier as she leads audiences through the following epochs:

 

     

 

The Greek world of Southern Italy

Greek literature:  Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch

Greek art:  Pythagoras in Greek art

Greek architecture:  Apollo Temples (the deity of Pythagoreanism) in Crotone and Metaponto

The Roman world – Europe, Middle East, North Africa

Roman literature:  Cicero, Ovid, Nicomachus, Diogenes Laertius

Roman art:  Pythagoras in Roman art

Roman architecture:  Pythagorean Underground Temple in Rome; Hadrian’s Pantheon

The Druids – priests and medical doctors

 

Middle Ages

Including Byzantine and Arab worlds

Medieval literature:  St. Jerome, St. Augustine, Petrarch, Dante

Medieval science and magic: Boethius; cosmology, mathematics, prognostication, and medicine

Medieval art:  Pythagoras in manuscripts, sculpture, and paintings

Medieval architecture: Early Christian architecture to Gothic cathedrals

 

Discovering Pythagoras will provide answers to our questions about Pythagoras and show his vast influence on the multifaceted relationships between religion, science and art.   Through the eyes of his followers, and across several centuries, it will also provide viewers with a glimpse of the beauty of the immortal soul that resides in every living being.

 

For further information and a detailed budget for Discovering Pythagoras, please contact Margaret Chew Barringer at 610.617.9919.