When we think of human proportions, we immediately visualize Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of Vitruvian Man. While Leonardo is most famous for the study of human proportions, his drawing is actually based on the theories of Vitruvius, who was a Roman author, architect, civil engineer and military engineer during the 1st century BC.
Vitruvius is known for his multi-volume work entitled De architectura. He dedicated it to his patron, the emperor Caesar Augustus, as a guide for building projects. Harmonic proportions were crucial in architecture, but also in what was considered the greatest work of art: the human body. This culmination of perfect proportion led Vitruvius in defining his Vetruvian Man, as drawn later by Leonardo da Vinci: the human body inscribed in the circle and the square (the fundamental geometric patterns of the cosmic order).
Vitruvius on the proportions of man:
3. Just so the parts of Temples should correspond with each other, and with the whole. The navel is naturally placed in the centre 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 centre, 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 arms fully extended, we find the latter measure equal tot he former; so that lines at right angles to each other, enclosing the figure, will form a square.
The drawing symbolizes the essential symmetry of the human body, and by extension, of the universe as a whole.
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