« Back to Curatorial Comment: “Elegant Geometry”
Here the Consanguinity Chart is shown with an overlay in English to give you sense of how it works. (You may also enlarge the image and enable the zoom function in order to read it better.) Imagine yourself at the unmarked spot in the center and then plot ancestors, descendants, aunts, uncles, and cousins from there.
Although this is a practical diagram, as in almost all medieval diagrams, the greater aim is to show the harmonious and balanced nature of the Christian universe. Its austere geometry is the aesthetic realization of that ideal. The man who holds the chart and whose body forms the chart is Adam, the first human, and the inscription tells us that just as all humans are born from one man, Adam, they die in one man, Christ—another example of perfect symmetry.