Leonardo's Vitruvian Man shows a naked man standing inside a circle and a square at once. Drawn in Milan around 1490, it tests a claim by the Roman architect Vitruvius, that the human body follows the same geometry as a well-built temple, and it corrects him: the circle is centered on the navel, the square is not.
The sheet is small, about 34 by 25 centimeters, drawn in pen and ink. Leonardo wrote the title himself, in mirror script: The proportions of the human body according to Vitruvius. No one has found any sign that a patron ordered it.
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The title makes a promise, and Vitruvius had been precise about it. In his account the circle and the square belong to the same man and rest on the same point.
Leonardo's drawing keeps the circle and the square, and breaks the rule that ties them together. The center of the square sits much lower on the body than the navel, near the groin.
I read that as a correction filed under the title of a tribute. Leonardo kept the Roman's name on the sheet and moved the Roman's shapes.
What Vitruvius wrote about the body
Vitruvius believed that a building without proportion made no sense. He wrote On Architecture, also known as the Ten Books on Architecture, in the time of Emperor Augustus, and its third book opens with temples. A temple, he argued, needed parts that related to one another as the parts of a well-shaped man do.
He found his units in the body itself. A foot, he noted, was one sixth of a man's height. A cubit was six palms, or twenty-four fingers. Foot, palm, finger and cubit were already the builders' measures, and every one of them was a piece of a person.
Then came the circle and the square. In the body, Vitruvius wrote, "the central point is naturally the navel." Set a compass there with a man lying flat, arms and legs spread, and his fingers and toes touch the circle. Measure from the soles to the crown, apply it to the outstretched arms, and the man fills a square, "as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square."
Vitruvius gave words, not a picture, and Leonardo was one of the readers who tried to turn them into a man. Earlier drawings of the passage had centered both shapes on the navel. On Leonardo's sheet, the man has four arms and four legs.
What You'll Discover
How one body fits both shapes.
Who else drew the same figure.
Why almost nobody sees the original.
The court case over a loan to Paris.