Da Vinci's Ghost (26 page)

L
EONARDO DREW THE
picture on a sheet of paper measuring 13½ by 9
⅝
inches—dimensions that make it just a bit larger than a standard letter-sized sheet of modern paper.
He used a variety of implements
as he worked: compass dividers and a set square (to define his circle and square, and to check his various measurements); perhaps a metal-point stylus (a predecessor of the pencil, which had yet to be invented, to trace the initial outlines of his drawing); and a pen and brown ink (to give the drawing its finished look). He appears to have drawn the circle and the square first, in the process pricking twelve holes in the
page with his compass divider; then to have placed his man inside the two figures; then to have inserted the scale underneath them, divided into units of fingers and palms; and, finally to have added his two paragraphs of text—the first above the picture, the second below it. The text itself, which he wrote in his trademark mirror script, is worth quoting in full.

Vitruvius, the architect
, has it in his work on architecture that the measurements of man are arranged by nature in the following manner: 4 fingers make 1 palm, and 4 palms make 1 foot; 6 palms make a cubit; 4 cubits make a man, and 4 cubits make one pace; and 24 palms make a man; and these measures are those of his buildings. If you open your legs so that you lower your head by
of your height, and open and raise your arms so that with your longest fingers you touch the level of the top of your head, you should know that the central point between the extremities of the outstretched limbs will be the navel, and the space that is described by the legs is an equilateral triangle.

The span to which the man opens his arms is equivalent to his height. From the start of the hair to the margin of the bottom of the chin is a tenth of the height of a man; from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head is an eighth of the height of the man; from the top of the breast to the top of his head is one sixth of the man; from the top of the breast to the start of the hair is a seventh part of the whole man; from the nipples to the top of the head is a quarter part of the man; the widest distance across the shoulders contains in itself a quarter part of the man; from the elbow to the tip of the hand will be the fifth part of a man; from this elbow
to the edge of the shoulder is an eighth part of the man; the whole hand is a tenth part of the man; the penis arises at the middle of the man; the foot is a seventh part of the man; from the sole of the foot to below the knee is a quarter part of the man; from below the knee to the start of the penis is a quarter part of the man; the portions that are to be found between the chin and the nose, and between the start of the hair and the eyebrows, are both spaces similar in themselves to the ear and are a third of the face.

There’s a
lot
going on in these two paragraphs. For starters, even though Leonardo opens with a matter-of-fact reference to the contents of the
Ten Books
, Vitruvius actually doesn’t say much of what Leonardo claims he does.
Only ten of the twenty-two measurements
that Leonardo mentions, in fact, derive from Vitruvius—and Leonardo has significantly altered two of them. (He makes the length of the foot equal to a seventh of the body’s total height, rather than a sixth, and does the same for the distance from the top of the chest to the hairline.) The other eleven measurements he mentions either list units of measure common in Leonardo’s day or can be traced directly to the reams of data on human proportion that he recorded in his notes. Leonardo makes Vitruvius his starting point, in other words, but when it comes to the details, he questions ancient authority and makes experience his guide.

The whole enterprise brings to mind the cartographic analogy that Leonardo would use in laying out his plans for
On the Human Body
. Painstakingly, over the course of months, he had gathered the precise coordinates of the body’s various provinces, just as Ptolemy had gathered the precise coordinates of
the world’s. The next logical step was to synthesize his data and create a single map of the whole, one that would not only portray it as it had been described in antiquity but correct that vision to reflect the results of modern discoveries. And that’s the vision, of course, that Leonardo conjured up in his drawing.

At the most elemental level, the picture is a study of human proportions. It’s a geography of the human ideal not unlike the one presented by Alberti in
On Sculpture
. The various lines that divide up the face and body parts of Leonardo’s figure attest to this: they all correspond to the proportional relationships that Leonardo described in his text. But the picture contains details that extend far beyond what he spells out there. It encodes many of the minute proportional relationships that Leonardo recorded so abundantly in his notes—but with incomparably greater concision. In this respect, the drawing proves the point that Francesco di Giorgio Martini liked to make: that pictures, not text, are the best way of transmitting detailed scientific information. Leonardo himself would later make that point repeatedly in his notebooks, specifically in the context of the human anatomy.
“You who think
to reveal the figure of man in words, with his limbs arranged in all their different attitudes,” he would write, “banish the idea from you. For the more minute your description, the more you will confuse the mind of the reader, and the more you will lead him away from the knowledge of the thing described.”

Leonardo also used his picture to work out what Vitruvius meant when he said that a man could be made to fit inside a circle and a square. He addressed the basic problem that had vexed Filarete: the fact that the human navel doesn’t actually lie at the midpoint between the crown and the feet. Instead
of drawing a circle and a square that shared a center with the human navel, as Francesco had done, Leonardo shifted his square downward—and, if Claudio Sgarbi is correct, he arrived at this solution after seeing the work of Giacomo Andrea. This allowed him to draw a single figure whose navel occupied the center of the circle and whose genitals occupied the center of the square: a figure, in other words, that corresponded to both the Vitruvian ideal
and
anatomical reality. Vitruvius in fact had never suggested that a circle and a square should be superimposed on the same human figure. Leonardo’s drawing therefore represented what one modern scholar has called
“an act of radical philology
.” Not only did it correct previous interpretations of an ancient text by decentering the circle and the square, it also managed, by laying the two shapes atop the same figure, to capture the essential message of the Vitruvian text: that the human form embodied the natural harmonies present in the circle and the square. Here Leonardo was up to one of his favorite tricks, doing two or more things at once—which, of course, is the essence of harmony. He doesn’t just describe harmony, as Vitruvius had done; he demonstrates it.

One element of Vitruvian Man has puzzled many observers. The figure’s left foot, which is turned out at a joint-crackingly unnatural angle, clearly doesn’t correspond to anatomical reality. Why would an artist as talented as Leonardo, and one so utterly dedicated to anatomical accuracy, make such an apparently clumsy choice, especially in a picture designed to capture the essence of the human ideal? The answer is simple. Canons of proportion since antiquity had often used the foot as one of the basic units of measurement. The convention in Leonardo’s time was therefore to accompany proportional studies with a
side view of the foot, creating a kind of visual key—as Francesco di Giorgio Martini did in his
Treatise
(
Figure 48
). Leonardo, however, decided to proceed differently. Interested in compressing as much visual information as possible into his drawing, he chose to incorporate a side view of the foot into his picture: a bit of visual shorthand that he knew contemporary viewers would understand.

The picture abounds with similar examples of visual shorthand and compression. Nowhere on the page does Leonardo bother to quote, or even mention, the text from the
Ten Books
on which his picture is based: the lines describing how a well-formed man, embodying the harmonies of cosmic design, can be inscribed in both a circle and a square. That’s because Leonardo knew his viewers would get the reference—and that his picture itself summed up the idea more concisely and elegantly than words ever could. The age-old symbolic resonances of the circle and the square also went without saying, as did the meaning of a figure spread-eagled inside them. Wordlessly, unavoidably, the picture summoned up a parade of visual associations: all those visions of the microcosm in which a figure, at once human
and divine, embraces and embodies the heavens and the earth. And in doing so it broadcast one of the most popular metaphysical propositions of the age. Taccola had spelled it out under his drawing of a man in a circle and a square (
“I have all measure in me
, both of what is heavenly above and what is earthly and infernal”); Francesco di Giorgio Martini had alluded to it in his
Treatise
(
“Man, called a little world
, contains in himself all the general perfections of the entire cosmos”); Marsilio Ficino had laid it out in his
Platonic Theology
(calling human nature
“the center of nature
, the middle point of all that is, the chain of the world, the face of all, and the knot and bond of the universe”); and Luca Pacioli, Leonardo’s friend and collaborator, would soon sum it up in his
On Divine Proportion
(
“From the human body derive
all measures and their denominations, and in it is to be found all and every ratio and proportion by which God reveals the innermost secrets of nature”).

Figure 48.
Proportions of the human body and foot, from Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s
Treatise
(c. 1481–84).

Leonardo himself made similar statements. Best known is the famous note he made to himself at about the time he drew Vitruvian Man (
“By the ancients
man was termed a lesser world, and certainly the use of this name is well bestowed, because his body is an analogue for the world”). But he had expressed the idea even more succinctly in the early 1480s, before leaving Florence for Milan. “Man,” he wrote, alluding to not only the human body but also the human spirit, “
is a model of the world
.”

M
OST OF
L
EONARDO’S
notebook sketches feel hasty and unfinished, less like the result of thought than like thought
itself
, captured in action. But Vitruvian Man is different. Leonardo drew
the picture with uncharacteristic precision, almost as though he was carefully preparing it to be printed.

That’s not an implausible idea. He seems indeed to have had some of his anatomical studies printed in about 1490, and although the originals are now lost, a few apparent copies survive in the work of others,
most notably Albrecht Dürer
. Leonardo himself would make clear later in life that he hoped his anatomical studies would be printed using high-quality copper plates rather than cheap woodblocks.
“I beseech you
who come after me,” he wrote alongside some detailed drawings of the spinal cord, “not to let avarice constrain you to make the prints in wood.” Less than a decade after Leonardo’s death, the physician Paolo Giovio reiterated this idea when summing up Leonardo’s legacy as an anatomist.
“He then tabulated
with extreme accuracy all the different parts,” Giovio wrote, “down to the smallest veins and the composition of the bones, in order that this work, on which he had spent so many years, should be published from copper engravings, for the benefit of art.”

All of this might explain why Vitruvian Man survives as an orphan sheet, detached for centuries from whatever notebook Leonardo originally drew it in. Perhaps, inspired by the works of Giacomo Andrea and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, he intended it to be transferred to a finely etched copper plate, for publication as part of a printed book: an illustrated edition of the
Ten Books
, say, or a treatise of his own on architecture. Or perhaps he drew it with a printed edition of
On the Human Body
in mind, as an introductory overview of the lesser world he hoped to map out in the book. Scholars have proposed all sorts of other possibilities: that he intended the picture as part of a treatise on painting; that
he envisaged it as the frontispiece
of his own version of
On Sculpture;
even that he designed it, in the words of one modern theorist, as
“a key to define
the elementary set of measurable proportions he needed in order to solve the problems of the perspective construction in [
The Last Supper
].” Far less credible and vastly harder to verify are the various popular theories, ranging from the reasonable to the insane, about the mathematical, geometrical, medical, and mystical codes that Leonardo supposedly hid in the picture.