Vitruvian Man - Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo’s pen-and-ink drawing Vitruvian Man comes from one of the many notebooks that he kept on hand during his mature years. It is accompanied by notes, written in mirror script, on the ideal human proportions that the Roman architect Vitruvius laid out in a book on architecture from the 1st century BCE. The drawing illustrates Vitruvius’s theory that the ideal human could fit within a circle and a square, two irreconcilable shapes. Leonardo resolved the concept by drawing a male figure in two superimposed positions—one with his arms outstretched to fit in a square and another with his legs and arms spread in a circle. The work shows not only Leonardo’s effort to understand significant texts but also his desire to expand on them. He was not the first to illustrate Vitruvius’s concepts, but his drawing later became the most iconic, partly because its combination of mathematics, philosophy, and art seemed a fitting symbol of the Renaissance. The drawing is now housed in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, where it is not typically on display but kept in a climate-controlled archive.