Le langage des proportions est le langage dans lequel s’écrivent les mathématiques mais aussi leurs applications, depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’au XVIIe siècle, jusqu’à ce que le langage des fonctions vienne le supplanter. Ainsi, par exemple, durant toute cette longue période, il n’est pas dit que la circonférence d’un cercle s’exprime en fonction du rayon de ce cercle et encore moins que cette circonférence vaille ce rayon multiplié par 2π, mais il est dit que les circonférences des cercles sont ..

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Abstract. In Rudolf Wittkower's influential view, Renaissance musical theory, based on Pythagorean and Platonic proportions, is a paradigm of harmony, order, and spatial organisation in architecture from Alberti to Palladio.However, sources from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) and other sixteenth-century French treatises, through René Ouvrard's Architecture Harmonique (1679) seem to show another, undiscovered story. The keys to interpretation include a different philological reading of Vitruvian theory of proportion, as Fra' Giocondo's French lessons show. This is a starting point for a particular sixteenth-century passage between two differents conceptions of architecture -from anthropomorphic to rhetoric, from volumetric to linear, and from quantitative to qualitative -which will find a definitive arrangement in the seventeenth century.

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In occidental Europe, the technique of inserting acoustic pots in churches’ walls spread from the 12th to the 17th century. Acousticians consider this technique as a pre-scientific anticipation of Helmholtz Resonator. This point of view has been questioned by numerous authors, especially in the domain of historical sciences with solid arguments. Based on one of the largest enquiries on French churches with pots achieved these last 15 years by a multidisciplinary team, we propose a scheme of interpretation of this technique taking into account the point of view of archaeologists, musicologists, and linguists and involving experimentation with singers. We show that voice was the target of this technique, by analyzing the frequency of the pots and their positioning in churches in connexion to liturgy. Their symbolic meaning will also be presented in relation to the medieval conception of sciences and music. In the end, the controversial question of a deliberate action on the acoustic of the churches will also be enlightened by the analysis of texts, particularly the vocabulary of French 16th century translation of Vitruvius.