the Vitruvian Man
My current interest is Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, the perfectly proportioned man. The concept of the Vitruvian Man however was borne 1500 years before Leonardo's birth.
A little history...
Marcus Vitruvius was a Roman architect in 1 BCE and he authored the famous treatise, De Architectura, which was further segregated into 10 blocks. Each block dealt with aspects of architecture, city planning, and machines and his book was the authority on these subjects up through the Renaissance, and still has influences in modern architecture today.
It is in the beginning of Book III, in his discussion on the building of temples, where the concept of Virtruvian Man emerges:
Similarly, in the members of a temple there ought to be the greatest harmony in the symmetrical relations of the different parts to the general magnitude of the whole. Then again, in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man can be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same as the height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are completely square.
(Marcus Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book III, Chapter 1, p 3)
It is Leonardo who completed the Vitruvian Man in 1490.
Leonardo’s drawings of the Vitruvian proportions of a man’s body first standing inscribed in a square and then with feet and arms outspread inscribed in a circle provides an excellent early example of the way in which his studies of proportion fuse artistic and scientific objectives.
It is Leonardo, not Vitruvius, who points out that ‘If you open the legs so as to reduce the stature by one-fourteenth and open and raise your arms so that your middle fingers touch the line through the top of the head, know that the centre of the extremities of the outspread limbs will be the umbilicus, and the space between the legs will make and equilateral triangle’ (Accademia, Venice).
Here he provides one of his simplest illustrations of a shifting ‘centre of magnitude’ without a corresponding change of ‘centre of normal gravity’. This remains passing through the central line from the pit of the throat through the umbilicus and pubis between the legs. Leonardo repeatedly distinguishes these two different ‘centres’ of a body, i.e., the centers of ‘magnitude’ and ‘gravity.
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Now my question is, how does Dan Brown relate these to Phi, the Divine Proportion. Lol.. I haven't tried measuring the tip of my head to my toes and dividing them by the length measuring from my navel to the toes.