Vitruvius, the ten books on architecture
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The pen and ink drawing by Leonardo da Vinci,
depicting a man fitting his body to a circle and a square by adjusting
the position of his arms and legs, is probably the most famous drawing
in the world.
Vitruvius was an ancient Roman architect who wrote a
series of ten books on architecture - one of the few collections of
books of its type that survived into the Renaissance. In the third
volume, which is on the proportions of temples, he states that these
buildings should be based on the proportions of man, because the human
body is the model of perfection. He justifies this by stating that the
human body with arms and legs extended fits into the perfect geometric
forms, the circle, and the square. This fragment of the philosophy of
Pythagoras seized the imagination of the Renaissance. Many artists tried
to illustrate this divine relationship, but with varying success.
In Venice around the year 1500, Leonardo once again demonstrated geometrically that the human soul is divine.
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