Da Vinci's Ghost (6 page)

Figures 9 and 10.
How to lay out a city, from Roman land-surveying treatises.
Left:
The horizon is divided into quadrants based on the cardinal directions. The
cardo [kardo] maximus
(KM) runs north-south, and the
decumanus maximus
(DM) runs east-west.
Right:
A generic Roman colony called
Colonia Augusta.

Romulus and the early Romans had originally learned the arts of site selection and town planning from the Etruscans, and in the
Ten Books
Vitruvius argued for a return to these traditional methods.
“I assert emphatically
,” he wrote, “that the old principles for selecting a site should be called back into service.” Augustus’s surveyors and architects set to work in precisely that way, relying on the ancient art of augury, with its emphasis on the circle and the square, and the idea of a direct connection to the gods. Gradually, inexorably, they began to construct what they hoped would become a perfect body of empire—one in which Rome the city and Rome the empire could be considered one and the same thing, encompassing all four corners of the earth.

* * *

T
HE IDEA OF
the Roman world as a body was no randomly chosen metaphor. It relied on an age-old philosophical conceit: that the human body was a scaled-down version of the world or the cosmos as a whole. Plato and other Greek philosophers had made the analogy repeatedly, as had the Bible (“Let us make man in our image”). Vitruvius himself had alluded to the idea, noting that blood, milk, sweat, urine, and tears were all related to the
“countless varieties of juices
” found in the ducts and veins of the earth. Writing not long after the death of Augustus,
Philo of Alexandria had taken the analogy
further, explicitly likening human bones to stones and wood, human hairs and nails to plants, human blood to rivers and streams. Astrologers and doctors, often one and the same in antiquity, developed their own version of the idea, expounding in detail on the direct correspondences between celestial objects and the human body. In this scheme of things, the spots and birthmarks covering the body of Augustus became manifest signs of his divinity, corresponding, according to his biographer Suetonius,
“in form, order, and number
with the stars of the Bear in the heavens.”

Nobody made the human analogy more consistently than the Stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome. The heavens, they argued, consisted of an invisible element called the
aether
, which had no material substance. The material world, on the other hand, was made up of four basic elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Holding all of the elements in a state of finely balanced tension and giving the cosmos its perfect form was the
pneuma
(Greek for “breath”): the all-pervasive divine spirit, or mind, of which the human mind was a small-scale model.
“Who can doubt
that a link exists between heaven and man,” Manilius would ask, adding, “Just as the world, composed of the elements of air and fire on high, and earth and water, houses an intelligence that, spread throughout it, directs the whole, so, too, with us the bodies of our earthly condition and our lifeblood house a mind that directs every part and animates the man.”

In making this kind of analogy, which biographers of Augustus would borrow and apply directly to their subject, Manilius and the Stoics were drawing on ancient Greek theories of medicine. The Greeks had written at great length on what constituted a healthy person. In their view, the human body wasn’t just subject to the laws of nature; it literally embodied them. The body was what the Romans called a
minor mundus:
a world in miniature, designed and held together according to the exact same principles as the cosmos itself. Like the world around it, the body consisted of the four material elements: flesh and bones (earth), blood (water), the invisible source of body heat (fire), and air. Keeping those elements in balance was the key to health; moisture had to be balanced against dryness, and heat against cold.

This led to some very strange but powerful ideas—which Vitruvius would lay out at length in the
Ten Books
. In southern climates, he explained, where Africans and Indians live, the excessive heat of the sun robs bodies of their moisture. This creates small people, darkens their skin, crinkles their hair, and raises the pitch of their voices. The heat quickens their minds, making them inventive and mentally agile, but it also dries out their blood, making them cowardly in battle. In northern climates, on the other hand, where the Germanic and Nordic tribes
live, cold temperatures give rise to an abundance of moisture. This creates large people, lightens their skin, straightens their hair, and lowers the pitch of their voices. The cold renders their minds sluggish, making them slow-witted, but it keeps their supply of blood ample, making them brave warriors.

If the peoples of the world were to become members of a healthy and whole body of empire, Vitruvius argued, their natural excesses needed balancing out. And the gods had placed the Romans in Italy, halfway between the north pole and the equator, for just that reason.

The people of Italy
are the most balanced with respect to both north and south, in terms of bodily form and the spiritual rigor required for decisive action. For exactly as the planet Jupiter is temperate, running in the middle between the sweltering planet Mars and the freezing planet Saturn, so, for the same reason, Italy has the unbeatable advantage of being balanced between the southern and northern regions, but with admixtures from both. And so she shatters the courage of [northern] barbarians by intelligent planning, and foils the plots of southerners by force of arms. Thus the divine mind allocated to the city of the Roman people a superb, temperate region in order that it could acquire governance of the whole world.

This is a remarkable passage. In effect, it provides the blueprint for a race-based ideology of empire that for two millennia would hold sway in Europe, and has yet to fully disappear. Geography and biology, Vitruvius was suggesting, are destiny. Placed at the center of the world by the gods, the Romans
would rule the world forever as part of the natural order—if, that is, they could assemble a coherent world body of empire. Which is exactly what Vitruvius set out to explain how to do in his
Ten Books.

A
S AN ARCHITECT
with plenty of hands-on experience, Vitruvius recognized that a singular challenge confronted the Romans if they wanted to build a body of empire based on the natural order. It would have to be assembled piece by piece, according to a set of standard measurements that could be understood and used by engineers and construction workers all over the world.

Earlier powers had encountered this challenge. Much head-scratching, for example, must have accompanied the construction of one fifth-century monument in Persia.
“The stonecutters who wrought the stone
,” an inscription on the monument reads, “those were Ionians and Sardians. The goldsmiths who wrought the gold, those were Medes and Egyptians. The men who wrought the wood, those were Sardians and Egyptians. The men who baked the brick, those were Babylonians. The men who adorned the wall, those were Medes and Egyptians.” The Greeks grappled with the problem in their own colonial building enterprises—and the only solution to it, they decided, was a system of measurement based on the human body.

This idea was nothing new. For as long as people have been measuring things, they’ve been using body parts to do it. Examples abound, among them the inch (the thumb), the foot, the cubit (the forearm), the Italian
braccio
(the full arm), and the fathom (both arms outstretched).

But all bodies are different. What the Greeks realized they needed was a system of measurements and proportional relationships that was based on a single body—an
ideal
body.

Fortunately, this was what Polykleitos and other Greek artists had tried to codify. As the Greek physician Galen would later record, Polykleitos in his books and statues had laid out
“the proper proportion
of the parts, such as, for example, that of finger to finger, and of all these to the palm and base of hand, of those to the forearm, of the forearm to the upper arm, and of everything to everything else.” This gave Greek builders what they needed. Using that model, they produced carvings in stone known as metrological reliefs, which provided them with a uniform standard of measurement embodied in the form of an idealized human figure.

Two such reliefs survive, including one from about the fifth century
B.C
. that sets out in precise detail the exact size and relative proportions of the body parts most commonly used for measurement: the fingers, palm, hands, arms, head, chest, and feet (
Figure 11
). Vitruvius was well acquainted with this sort of relief, and with the canons of measurement proposed
by ancient Greek artists. He had them in mind, in fact, when he wrote what would become the most famous passage of the
Ten Books:
a brief description of the figure we know today as Vitruvian Man.

Figure 11.
The Oxford metrological relief (Greek, fifth-century
B.C
.), laying out a uniform system of measurement based on the ideal human form.

T
HE PASSAGE APPEARS
at the beginning of the third of his ten books, where he lays out principles for the design and construction of temples. The context is critical. Vitruvius knew that temples were the central element of Augustus’s building campaign. They, more than anything else, signified his desire to piece together a body of empire. They weren’t just august places, carved out of the sky and aligned with the gods. They were Augustus
himself
—august embodiments of earthly power and authority, full of dignity and holiness, designed according to the principles of the natural order. As one modern scholar has observed, the poet Ovid memorably summed up the idea in a pun.
“Quis locus
est templis augustior?”
he asked. “What place is more august [more Augustus] than temples?”

This is the context into which Vitruvian Man was born.
“No temple can be put together
coherently without symmetry and proportion,” Vitruvius wrote, “unless it conforms exactly to the principle relating the members of a well-shaped man.”

At a literal level this is a very basic proposition: a temple must be designed according to the set of natural laws embodied in the human form. But that very linkage, between the universal and the particular as they come together in architecture and anatomy, implies something much grander. The proper building of a temple starts with the contemplation of the cosmos—but
the only way to make sense of the cosmos, too vast an entity for the human mind to comprehend, is to study the scaled-down version on display in a well-shaped man.

Vitruvius then went on to lay out what the exact proportions of this figure should be. (In text only, it should be noted; no evidence survives that he ever illustrated his book.) The distance from his chin to the top of his forehead, he wrote, should be equal to the distance from his wrist to the tip of his middle finger—and both should be equal to one-tenth of his total body height. The distance from his chest to the crown of his head should be one-fourth of his total height, as should the width of his chest and his forearm. His foot should be one-sixth of his total height. His face itself should be divided into equal thirds: the first extending from the base of the chin to the bottom of the nostrils, the second from the nostrils to a point between the eyebrows, and the third from there to the top of the forehead. Similar relationships applied to other parts of the body, he continued, noting that readers could find details in the well-known works of
“the famous painters
and sculptors of antiquity”—a nod to Polykleitos and other Greeks.

But Vitruvius didn’t limit himself to enumerating the proportions of his well-shaped man. In the passage that comes next, he placed him inside a circle and a square—and gave shape to Vitruvian Man as we know him today. “
Likewise
,” he wrote,

in sacred dwellings the symmetry of the members ought to correspond completely, in every detail and with perfect fitness, to the entire magnitude of the whole. By the same
token, the natural center of the body is the navel, for if a man were placed on his back with his hands and feet out-spread, and the point of a compass put on his navel, both his fingers and his toes would be touched by the line of the circle going around him. You could also find a squared layout in the body in the same way that you made it produce the circular shape. For if you measured from the bottom of his feet to the top of his head and compared that measurement to his outspread hands, you would find the breadth the same as the height, just as in areas that have been squared with a set square.

The passage hums with resonances. Anatomy and architecture, art and aesthetics, the circle and the square, medicine and geography, religion and philosophy, politics and the ideology of empire—they’re all there, rolled into one. Part divine and part human, the source of harmony and order, Vitruvian Man, as described in the
Ten Books
, represents the measure of all things. At one level he’s a simple study in proportions, but at another he’s the expression of an ideal: a human figure whose body is the world, whose mind is its spirit, and whose being represents the power and order of the heavens brought down to Earth. His spread-eagled figure haunts the circular layout of Roman temples and cities, the full span of the globe, even the cosmos itself.