There is no obvious survival advantage in experiencing these views, just as our delight in walking the streets of any well-preserved medieval town has nothing directly to do with improving our adaptive capability. The fact is that there is a whole realm of emotional experience which seems to refer back to a pre-rational relationship between humans and the natural environment. This is what archetypal symbols are all about – ‘arche’, the beginning.

It also needs to be remembered that symbolism can affect an aesthetic response in a negative way. To one person the fortress-like chateau towering above the town of Saumur is ‘picturesque’; to another it is a symbol of the tyranny visited on the populace by the military aristocracy and, as such, undermines the aesthetic outcome.

…echo the Gerard Manley Hopkins line: ‘likeness tempered with difference’. So, the attainment of knowledge has affinities with the perception of harmony – order transcending complexity to establish a new concept with its unique elegance.

Buildings are the unavoidable art, whether the high art of the architectural masterpiece or the rich vernacular heritage of villages, towns and cities. Their forms and details are absorbed mostly on the nonconscious level, yet they weave their spell on the mind without our consent. They influence mood and demeanour, especially when they tap in to the subterranean currents of archetypal symbolism. On this level they can transmit subliminal messages of reassurance.

As students in the 1950s we were conditioned into despising the excesses of baroque/rococo architecture; that is, until we were reprogrammed by Nikolaus Pevsner in his Slade lectures at Cambridge.

Cities are architecture plus space and time.

However, it is on the grand scale of cities like Amsterdam or Bruges and towns like Goslar that the archetypal contest between order and anarchy is played out with gusto. They are a kind of parable, externalising the triumph of order and harmony over dissonance, remembering that harmony depends as much on clash as correspondence.

One effect of all this is that towers, especially when associated with religious buildings, carry a powerful symbolic charge which greatly adds to their informational weight.

Buildings are the pressure cookers of cultural change.

What Zeki suggests is that a principle function of art is to reveal the order and constancy which underpins the fast-moving events of life. It enables us to stand back from the rush of incidents to contemplate what T.S. Eliot called ‘the still point of the turning circle’.