The Vitruvian Man
—Chrissie

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            The Vitruvian Man is one of the most famous works to come out of the Renaissance. It is a drawing of a nude man who is shown in two different positions, one with arms and legs outstretched at an angle, the other with legs together and arms straight out from the shoulders. His fingertips brush the top edges of a circle and a square, and his feet perch precisely on the bottom of those shapes. It is based on a description of the proportions of the human body by the Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio which were a bit of a mystery in Medieval Europe.

            Vitruvius was a soldier and engineer who served under Gaius Julius Caesar in the Gallic Wars and the Civil War. Little is known about him beyond his own work, de Architectura (On Architecture), and some mentions in others’ works. Published in the reign of Augustus and dedicated to the Princeps, de Architectura is the only surviving work on architecture from classical antiquity. Vitruvius wrote that buildings should reflect nature: a bird builds a nest for the same reason a human builds a house. With that in mind, he also considered the conditions of an area in which building was to be done, with climate and geography at the top of the list of conditions dictating the type of construction and materials used. He also defined three qualities necessary to any building: stability, utility, and beauty.

            In describing how proportions and symmetry work in nature, Vitruvius described the human body as a perfect example of these elements. In Book Three of de Architectura, he says,

Just so the parts of Temples should correspond with each other, and with the whole. The navel is naturally placed in the center of the human body, and, if in a man lying with his face upward, and his hands and feet extended, from his navel as the center, a circle be described, it will touch his fingers and toes. It is not alone by a circle, that the human body is thus circumscribed, as may be seen by placing it within a square. For measuring from the feet to the crown of the head, and then across the arms fully extended, we find the latter measure equal to the former; so that lines at right angles to each other, enclosing the figure, will form a square.

It is unlikely the original included an image alongside the description but, if there was, it was lost over centuries of copying. And so, how exactly the text could be depicted as an image was a mystery that was discussed by philosophers through the Middle Ages, but with no solution found. Some placed the circle inside the square, some the square inside the circle, but neither could be manipulated to match what Vitruvius had described. Until, that is, a man who thought about form and proportion and the connections between nature and the creations of humanity in a way that the Roman would have recognized: Leonardo da Vinci.

            Other attempts to depict Vitruvius’ description had all worked from the idea that the center point of both the circle and the square were to be the same, the man’s navel; da Vinci challenged this by placing the center of the circle on the figure’s navel but shifting the center of the square over the figure’s genitals. With this slight alteration, the drawing fully matched the description in terms of mathematical proportions and symmetry.

            This drawing is a perfect representation of the Renaissance: art, philosophy, and science all come together in a single work inspired by the words of a classical author.