Not so. The Leonardo of Fibonacci fame never applied his sequence or the golden ratio in any forms of art or design. Leonardo da Vinci, however, applied the golden ratio in his paintings, along with other Renaissance artists.

It was Leonardo Fibonacci – a famous Italian mathematician in the 13th century, not an artist from the 15th century.

That’s 200 years and hundreds of hours of studying apart

Ive tought Byron in my many years of teaching in Russia

Great point, Gary. As humans we never grow tired of beauty, and therefore we never grow tired of the golden ratio.

The golden ratio is a tool, not a rule, in design. Even if it were imposed as a rule though, there’s no reason to assume that the end result would be boring and dull. That’s like saying that if everyone just uses the twelve notes in the Western scale and applies standard principles of music theory that music will be boring and dull. That’s just not so, is it. The golden ratio is often found in the proportions of a beautiful face, yet we never seen to tire of those either.

Both the golden ratio and musical scales appeal to our natural sense of what is beautiful and harmonious. This is probably hard-wired into our perceptions, but is also grounded in the unique mathematical relationships they employ. Part of their beauty is that they can be applied in an unlimited number of ways, so nothing is boring and dull when creativity is at work.

This applies to applications in design as well. You can have endless variations of great-looking designs all based on the golden ratio. As another example, the golden ratio is applied by a leading character designer for cartoons, and his characters are still always unique, interesting and appealing. See https://www.goldennumber.net/golden-ratio-cartoon-character-design/ for more.