4 attempts to discover the ideal proportions of the human body and how da Vinci arrived at the ‘most famous drawing in the world’ – 06/18/2023 – Science

If you had to draw a person and were asked to make the drawing proportionately perfect, how would you do it?

This is the challenge faced by all artists since man began painting on cave walls more than 40,000 years ago: finding a set of simple rules that will help them draw the human figure as closely as possible to reality.

The rules —known as artistic canons— that are taught today in art schools are based on experiments and measurements made by hundreds of visionaries throughout history.

For example, one of the most used drawing teaching methods, Loomis, uses lines to divide the body into eight equal parts, all the same size as the head. This means that, according to this method, “the idealized human body is eight heads high, the torso three heads, and the legs four.”

But how did the idea of ​​using lines to divide and geometric figures to represent the body come about? And who were the most successful in defining the perfect measurements?

BBC News Mundo (BBC Spanish service) took a journey through the history of art to meet the sculptors, painters and architects who through their visual sensitivity and boundless ingenuity (as well as many trials and errors) achieved the most perfect design possible from ourselves.

Discover four attempts to discover ideal body proportions—until Leonardo da Vinci arrived at a theory that is still praised today.

1. The 18-line grid

After spending years studying the works of ancient Egypt, Danish Egyptologist Erik Iversen published in 1955 a book that would change people’s perception of the art of that ancient civilization.

In his studies, Iversen found traces of a grid of 18 horizontal and 18 vertical lines on which some human images were illustrated. Everyone agreed that the first line was on the sole of the figure’s foot and the last on the line where the hair grows.

Iversen took these measurements and compared them with different statues of the time and realized that the ancient Egyptians used these measurements to maintain the proper proportion of the human figure in their representations, that is, they had the first artistic canon known to us.

The study of these proportions, which Iversen compiled in Canon and proportions in Egyptian artis an area that continues to this day due to the few records available.

But the discoveries made in recent years are very impressive: art historian Gay Robbins, in her book Proportion and Style in Ancient Egyptsays that the initial 18-line grid may have evolved into a more exact 19-line grid as the art developed within the empire.

2. Polykletos and the finger

Between 450 and 415 BC, a Greek sculptor named Polycletus began to produce beautiful bronze statues of young athletes, but with certain details that seemed to give them more credibility.

Polykletos had the idea that the body should be represented in sculpture as a system of forces and counterforces —hard and relaxed body parts—to give an impression of dynamism.

Some authors consider that these ideas of Polyclitus were influenced by those of Pythagoras of Samos and his followers, who believed that everything in the natural world followed a basic language: that of numbers.

However, Francesca Fiorani, an art professor at the University of Virginia, told BBC News Mundo that Policleto was perceptive enough to avoid falling into arbitrary measures that would not work for different types of bodies.

“Polycleto’s canon is not a mathematical rule, it is a relational rule”, she says, referring to the system that the sculptor used to take body parts such as the phalanx of the little finger as a reference index to give the measurements of the full body.

So influential was his system in the ancient world that a writing by the famous first-century Greek physician, Galen, references Polykletus’ canon: “Beauty lies in the symmetry of the parts. [do corpo]like finger to finger […] just as it is written in the canon of Polykleitos”.

3. Vitruvius and the navel

Directly influenced by Greek concepts of beauty, the concept of symmetry in Rome began to be carried over to other disciplines, including architecture.

A Roman soldier and architect named Vitruvius took it upon himself to put Pythagorean ideas of mathematics at the center of everything and compiled a ten-book treatise (Of Architecture), in which he establishes what an architect does, what kind of education he needs, the types of buildings and structures that concern him, where the principles and ideas for construction come from and, above all, the importance of imitating nature as a starting point essential starting point for the project.

Influenced like Polykletus by the Pythagoreans, Vitruvius uses his third book on architecture to suggest that the design of the perfect temple should be based on the proportions of the human body, writing the following: “The navel is at the center of the human body, and if a man is lying down lying face down, with hands and feet outstretched, with the navel as its center, a circle can be described which will touch your fingers and toes.

“The human body is not only circumscribed in a circle, but can also be seen by placing it in a painting.”

The intention was to design a building based on these two basic geometric figures, the square and the circle, which maintained the correct proportions of the human body.

To obtain it, Vitruvius gives the indications for a symmetrical body: “The length of a foot is one sixth of the height of the body. The forearm, one fourth. The breadth of the chest, one fourth.”

De Architectura survived thanks to copies kept in places like Charlemagne’s personal library, and would only be rediscovered more than 1,400 years later, in the Renaissance.

4. The man at the center

In 1486, a humanist interested in the classics of the Greco-Roman world, Giovanni Sulpizio da Veroli, had access to the Vitruvian manuscript and published it for the first time Of Architecture.

Thanks to the press, works that previously could only be accessed by the Church passed into the public domain. And with the Renaissance interest in Greco-Roman classics, Vitruvius’s treatise became essential for architects at the time.

Famous names like Filipo Brunelleschi, who designed the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, studied Vitruvius’ work and adapted elements from his canon. Or Francesco di Giorgio and Leonardo da Vinci.

“What made the work of Vitruvius attractive to Leonardo and Francesco is that it gave concrete expression to the analogy that came from Plato and the ancients, which became a definitive metaphor for Renaissance humanism,” explains writer Walter Isaacson in his biography of Leonardo da Vinci: “the relationship between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the Earth”.

In his writings, Francesco di Giorgio, one of the most renowned architects of his time and a great friend of Leonardo, says: “All the arts and all the rules in the world are derived from a well composed and well proportioned human body.” A thought very similar to that of Vitruvius.

Different Renaissance architects, including Giacomo Andrea and Francesco di Giorgio, tried to follow the Vitruvian rules, but it would take someone with knowledge of all branches to interpret and execute them in such a way as to mark the history of art.

Finally, Leonardo

Unlike the group of architects with whom he lived at this stage of his life, Leonardo saw something more interesting in the work of Vitruvius. “Leonardo’s interest is the human body”, explains professor Francesca Fiorani to BBC News Mundo. Specifically, “the human body in motion”.

Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man is currently stored in a darkened room in the Accademia Gallery in Venice to prevent deterioration.

Leonardo kept it with him until his death and it became one of the most iconic images in Western culture.

Walter Isaacson describes him in his book as “a meticulously done drawing, unlike his contemporaries”.

“In one of his notes, below the drawing, Leonardo describes additional aspects of positioning: ‘If you spread your legs far enough so that your head is lowered one fourteenth of its height and you raise your hands far enough so that your fingers are extended touch the line at the top of your head, know that the center of the outstretched arms will be the navel”.

This is where Leonardo’s thinking differs from that of his contemporaries, explains Fiorani, who presents a study on Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

“Her concern was not so much architecture, but the human body, and the human body in motion”, explains the academic to BBC Mundo. “What it does is it draws a man with arms and legs spread out inside the circle, but then it draws the same man — not another one — with legs closed and arms outstretched, but at different angles.”

“Since the navel of the two male figures is the center of the body and the circle, it obeys the rules, but the center of the painting is the genitals. What it does is give the sensation of movement”, says Fiorani.

Isaacson recounts that, for his drawing, Leonardo ignored the body measurements that Vitruvius had provided—despite giving credit to Vitruvius for the measurements in the drawing—and used those that he himself was able to identify.

Experts agree that the secret of Leonardo’s genius was that he used direct observation and experimentation rather than relying on rules laid down by others, and that through his detailed anatomical studies using cadavers—of which illustrations are used in medical books until today— corrected some mistakes made by the Roman architect in his original measurements.

This is reflected, says Isaacson, in the fact that less than half of the 22 measurements Leonardo used on the Vitruvian man match the ones Vitruvius gave in his original text.

“The length of outstretched arms is equal to the height of a man”, reads the footnotes of what the British Martin Kemp, art historian and Leonardo specialist, defined as “the most famous drawing in history”.

In a study carried out in 2020 by experts from the West Point Military Academy in the United States, they used the measurements of nearly 65,000 people between the ages of 17 and 21 and found that those created by Da Vinci —personified in his famous drawing in 1492— are fascinatingly close to reality.

Diana Thomas, a mathematician at West Point, said: “Despite different samples and methods of calculation, Da Vinci’s ideal human body and its proportions were similar to those obtained with contemporary measurement methods.”

After the Renaissance, Western art ceased to be so concerned with representing reality as it is perceived, and began to experiment with the abstract — those things that we perceive but do not have a natural visual representation. As a result, interest in realism took a backseat.

Modern methods — like the Loomis we mentioned at the beginning — are simplified versions of these rules that Da Vinci brought to their maximum expression in a design that seeks to reflect the geometric perfection of the human body and its relationship to the geometric perfection that the Pythagoreans saw in the cosmos. .

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