Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, drawn c. 1509, epitomizes the Renaissance emphasis on the individual; the human figure manifests the direct creation of "perfect" geometric forms and symbolizes the ideal of a harmonic universe. The Timepiece of Humanity offers an alternative view of the human body's relationship to "perfect" forms; a series of interrelated circles and squares, (where each successive circle and square is exactly double the area of the preceding circle or square), reveals an otherwise imperceptible morphological order when superimposed with an upright human figure.
"When fifteenth-century writers spoke of deriving architectural forms from the human body, they did not think of the body as a living organism, but as a microcosm of the universe, a form created in God's image, and created with the same perfect harmony that determines the movement of the spheres or musical consonances. This harmony could not be discovered empirically, since it was an ideal unattainable in actuality, but it could be symbolized mathematically. Thus the ideal human form was expressed either in numerical or geometrical formulae: numerical proportions were established for the body that determined simple relationships between the parts and the whole (e.g., head:body = 1:7) or the body was inscribed within a square or a circle or some combination of the two, sometimes with the navel exactly in the center. Architectural proportions and forms could then be associated with these formulae..
James S. Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo (Baltimore: Penguin Books Inc., 1970), pp. 38-39.
"...The so-called canon of Polykleitos is not recorded, and the rules of proportion that have come down to us through Pliny and other ancient writers are of the most elementary kind. Probably the Greek sculptors were familiar with a system as subtle and elaborate as that of their architects, but we have scarcely any indication as to what it was. There is, however, one short and obscure statement in Vitruvius that, whatever it meant in antiquity, had a decisive influence on the Renaissance. At the beginning of the third book, in which he sets out to give the rules for sacred edifices, he suddenly announces that these buildings should have the proportions of a man. He gives some indication of correct human proportions and then throws in a statement that man's body is a model of proportion because with arms and legs extended it fits into those "perfect" geometrical forms, the square and the circle. It is impossible to exaggerate what this simple-looking proposition meant to the men of the Renaissance. To them it was far more than a convenient rule: it was the foundation of a whole philosophy."
Kenneth Clark, The Nude (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), p. 36.
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