The Meaning of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man
The iconic image of man’s perfect proportions explained
It is one of the most famous images to come out of the Italian Renaissance: a man is stood with his arms outstretched, positioned inside a square, overlaid with a circle.
I think the power of this image lies in the fact that it can be understood on an intuitive level first — as a declaration of the mathematical perfection of the human body — before its underlying meaning might be explored further.
But where does this image come from?
The Architecture of the Human Body
The deeper meaning of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing, made around 1492, begins nearly 1600 years earlier in Ancient Rome.
Ancient thinkers had long assigned the circle and the square with symbolic meaning. Because of their symmetry, circles were seen as representations of the cosmic and the divine, and also an emblem of natural balance. The square on the other hand represented the earthly and the secular.
The title given to the image, Vitruvian Man, refers to the Roman architect named Vitruvius who lived from around 80–70 BC until about 15 BC. Vitruvius drew on the traditions of geometric symbolism to develop a theory of cosmic order and its application to building projects.
Whilst the life of Vitruvius is little known, one surviving artefact is his book De architectura, libri decem, known today as The Ten Books on Architecture.
As a treatise on building techniques, it was a hugely influential work, not least because it gave later generations of architects insight into the means and methods of Ancient Roman architecture.
Not only did the author describe the virtues of a well-considered building, he also explored civic projects like town planning and the engineering of water supplies and aqueducts.