Vesica piscis
Two circles of the same size overlapping so that each passes through the other’s centre, and the pointed oval they share. It is the figure behind the first construction in Euclid’s Elements. Medieval Christian art used the same oval, the mandorla, to frame Christ, and modern sacred geometry gives it meanings of its own.
Meaning
Vesica piscis (vuh-SY-kuh PY-sis, Dictionary.com’s first pronunciation) is Latin for “bladder of a fish”. MathWorld defines it as the lens made where two equal circles meet when their centres are one radius apart: each of its arcs is exactly a third of a circle, and two equilateral triangles fit inside it. Christian art calls the same shape the mandorla, Italian for almond, and Amelia Carolina Sparavigna of the Politecnico di Torino, who traced both names, found “mandorla” in use long before “vesica piscis”. Dictionary.com defines the figure as one used especially in early Christian art as an emblem of Christ. Today it has two sets of owners who mean different things by it: Christian art, where it frames Christ and the Virgin, and the modern sacred geometry movement, which, in Sparavigna’s words, “ascribes symbolic and sacred meanings to certain geometric shapes and proportions”.
Origin and history
The figure opens Euclid’s Elements. Its first proposition is to construct an equilateral triangle on a given line AB, and Euclid does it with this pair of circles: one drawn with centre A through B, a second with centre B through A, and lines from A and B to the point C where the circles cut one another. David Joyce of Clark University, in his edition, notes that there are two choices for C, which are the two tips of the oval. MathWorld records the same figure in Old Babylonian mathematics, where it is called the ox-eye.
The Latin name is much younger than the shape. Sparavigna traces it to the German “fischblosen”, fish-bladder, which Albrecht Dürer used in his book on geometry, and finds that Dürer did not use the word for a sacred form. Dictionary.com dates the first record of “vesica piscis” in English to 1800–10. After the middle of the nineteenth century, Sparavigna writes, the term “exploded in literature”; writers then criticised it and insisted that the proper name for the Christian symbol is “mandorla”.
The mandorla in Christian art
In medieval art the oval frames a holy figure. The Glossary of Medieval Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh defines the mandorla as “an almond-shaped motif in which Christ sits”, sometimes used also for the Virgin. The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya describes the scene called Christ in Majesty: Christ seated and enthroned within a mandorla, facing the viewer, blessing with his right hand and often holding the book in his left. The museum calls it the image that above all describes the divinity of Christ, and finds it in painted apses, in carved doorways and on the altar frontals of the Romanesque. MathWorld adds that Renaissance artists frequently surrounded images of Jesus with the vesica piscis.
In sacred geometry today
The same lens recurs in the Seed of life: MathWorld describes that figure as six circles centred on the circumference of a seventh, all of one radius, which makes six congruent lenses round the centre, each of them a vesica. The Flower of life repeats it across a whole grid.
At Chalice Well in Glastonbury the well lid is a vesica piscis in wrought iron and oak, made by Bligh Bond at the invitation of Alice Buckton in 1919 and dedicated on All Saints’ Day. Bond said the design followed a thirteenth-century pattern and stood for the Bleeding Lance and “the Visible and Invisible Worlds interlocked with each other”; at the millennium Hamish Miller made the underside of the lid. The Chalice Well Trust today calls the vesica “the ancient sacred geometry symbol of the union of complementary opposites”, of heaven and earth and of the divine feminine and masculine, and uses it throughout its gardens. That reading is the trust’s own. Sparavigna’s history finds the name coined for a fish bladder by Dürer, and the shape taken up as a sacred symbol under that name only after the middle of the nineteenth century.
The Pythagorean apple story
Some recent writers tie the vesica to Pythagoras. Sparavigna reports the story: the followers of Pythagoras are said to have used an apple for symbolic communication, because an apple sliced across shows a pentagram in its core, and sliced lengthwise shows two intersecting circles, the mandorla. She notes that writers have tied the lens to Pythagorean philosophy only recently.
Read next
- Next in Sacred geometryGolden ratio and golden spiralThe golden ratio, φ, about 1.618, is what you get by cutting a line so that the whole is to the longer part as the longer part is to the shorter. The golden spiral is drawn through a rectangle with its sides in that ratio. Luca Pacioli called it the divine proportion in 1509; many modern claims about it, from the Parthenon to the human body, have no evidence behind them.
- The same shape in Knights Templar symbolsThe dome on the Templar sealThe domed building on the reverse of the Templar seal, which historians read as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, called the Temple of the Lord by the crusaders.
See also
Seed of life, Flower of life, Metatron’s cube, Platonic solids.
Sources
- MathWorld: Vesica Piscis, Eric W. Weisstein, MathWorld (Wolfram Research), entry
- MathWorld: Seed of Life, Eric W. Weisstein, MathWorld (Wolfram Research), entry
- A discussion of a geometric shape that became a symbol known as mandorla or vesica piscis, starting from a Pythagorean point of view, Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, 2020 (doi 10.5281/zenodo.4298852), Politecnico di Torino (IRIS institutional archive), abstract
- Euclid’s Elements, Book I, Proposition 1, D. E. Joyce (editor), Clark University, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Clark University, Proposition 1 and Guide
- vesica piscis, Dictionary.com (Random House Unabridged Dictionary), entry and etymology
- Glossary of Medieval Art and Architecture: mandorla, Jane Vadnal, University of Pittsburgh, mandorla
- Christ in Majesty (Maiestas Domini) (glossary), Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, glossary entry
- A Brief History of Chalice Well, version of 25 March 2025, Chalice Well Trust (via the Internet Archive), article text
- About Chalice Well, Chalice Well Trust, page text
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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