Leonardo fixed a Roman architect's maths by moving the square's centre
Vitruvius claimed a man with limbs outstretched fits both a circle and a square centred on his navel. Artists tried and failed to draw it. Around 1490 Leonardo da Vinci made it work by centring the circle on the navel but the square lower, on the groin, and produced one of the most famous drawings ever made.
Vitruvius, a Roman architect active roughly from 80 to 20 BCE, wrote De architectura, the only substantial treatise on building to survive from antiquity. Its third book compares the harmony of a temple to that of the body. The text lay hidden in monastic copies until Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered it in the fifteenth century, after which Francesco di Giorgio Martini and others attempted illustrations. Leonardo may have been nudged by the architect Giacomo Andrea, with whom he dined in 1490 and whose own version surfaced only in the 1980s.
The sheet, 34.4 by 25.5 centimetres, is drawn mainly in pen and light-brown ink. There are no hesitant sketch lines: Leonardo laid it out with metalpoint, calipers and compass, leaving tiny tick marks as measurements. One figure makes a T inside the square and another an X inside the circle, overlaid like successive phases of motion, with fingers and toes placed so they never cross the lines. He also corrected Vitruvius on the head's proportions using Alberti's De pictura. A popular claim that the drawing encodes the golden ratio is doubtful; it probably predates Leonardo's meeting with Luca Pacioli, and the geometry does not fit.
Dates proposed range from 1485 to 1491, with Martin Kemp favouring about 1487. The drawing probably passed to Leonardo's pupil Francesco Melzi, and a later owner, Venanzio de Pagave, persuaded engraver Carlo Giuseppe Gerli to publish it, spreading the image widely. The Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice acquired it in 1822. Light fades it, so it lives in a locked fourth-floor room and is rarely shown.
Its fragility triggered a 2019 lawsuit by the heritage group Italia Nostra to stop a loan to the Louvre for the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death; a judge allowed the loan with strict light limits. In 2022 an Italian court ordered Ravensburger to stop selling a 1,000-piece puzzle of it, fining the firm 1,500 euros a day, but a German court sided with the puzzle maker in March 2024.
Source: Vitruvian Man
