#25 Da Vinci Vindicated

Thought I'd better bring out the original, after shamelessly exploiting his "Vitruvian Man" for rhetorical purposes over in the Daily Mosteller. And it gives me a chance to recount an encounter with Leonardo, some 35 years ago.

First of all, it's an evocative piece of work. No wonder the drawing has been redacted/exploited for all manner of logos by myriad health/fitness/science entities like Blue Cross and Sky Lab II--though usually stylized and decidedly non-gender-specific, unlike the original here. Setting aside the artist's always interesting homoerotic subtext in almost everything he did--q.v. especially the Da Vinci Code conundrum about the ambiguous male/female figure at "The Last Supper"--this piece is a fascinating blend of art and science, or at least pseudo-science. It's the thought that counts.

And no man ever thought so much about so many things as Leonardo, as we all know. In fact, it got in the way of his work, more often than not. No greater "Renaissance-Man"; no greater procrastinator. My hero. All told, his greatness rests on a very small number of actual accomplishments. This one, though, is particularly interesting because it's an overt attempt to resolve, through his art, that persistent conundrum of his age: New Science vs. New Humanism. He was trying to humanize science here, and vice-versa. We know from the drawing's footnotes that he was faithfully following "scientific" guidelines for perfect human proportions, laid down by the Roman architect Vitruvius. (The artist had already been forced to study the "New Anatomy"--people were finally carving up people in the name of medical science--by his first teacher, and we can see it in those macabre "muscle-and-bone" sketches of his, which were nonetheless well ahead of their time for accuracy.)

All this went along with the optimistic Renaissance notion of the perfectibility of man. "Drawing" upon a countryman from the classical period, Da Vinci used the architect's questionable geometrics to construct a human figure of ideal proportions. He was serious:

For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height ... from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the face itself, the distance from the bottom of the chin to the the underside of the nostrils is one third of it; the nose from the underside of the nostrils to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the lowest roots of the hair is also a third, comprising the forehead. ["Mona Lisa?"] The length of the foot is one sixth the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth. The other members, too, have their own symmetrical proportions, and it was by employing them that that the the famous painters and sculptors of antiquity attained to great and endless renown.

Leonardo even tried to crack that ancient chestnut, "squaring the circle," in his drawing above, and supplemented in the following:

Then again, in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses [think of the bygone, I assume, grammar-school chalkboard-compass--a giant one!] 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 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 perfectly square.

Perfect nonsense, of course. But it seemed to make good art. How about the perfect face ... the perfect "enigmatic" smile? (more)
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