How can two places be united with one sign, with just one imagination? A mental sign exists that is already "Word", a "verbum mentis" within our mind that may move down into our mouth and become "sound", but then may also descend onto paper and become line, writing, drawing, engraving, painting, flight.
The point comes before the line. Pietro Della Francesca said "the point is the smallest thing the eye can understand, I say that the line is the extension from one point to another". Leonardo confirmed that the point is "quantity continued… divisible ad infinitum". And Ghiberti declared: "If points placed one after the other are joined, a line is formed".
Maybe this is why the architect Bartalini attempted to unite two places that were a few kilometres apart with a point extended in line and in form: obviously it is a mental line going from point to point, from sign to sign, from form to form, from person to person, from breath to breath. And this is why Hans Peter Ditzler develops forms and distributes them in space, in the air and close to trees, like signs of life and also of friendship and the past.
It has nothing to do with forms existing in the mind of a God (as the entire scholasticism has continued to repeat from Plato onwards), but of forms that produce substance and enable an appraisal of "formal beauty". Benedetto Croce quite rightly wrote: "that beauty that we call grace does not spring from bodies nor from matter, whose nature is quite ugly, but springs from form". The forms that we talk about are those created by Hans Peter Ditzler.