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Story and context
A man inscribed in a circle and a square, drawn to test the measures that the Roman architect Vitruvius gave for the human body. The notes above and below are written in mirror script.
Vitruvius had written that a well-made man, arms and legs spread, fits both a circle centred on the navel and a square. Others had tried to draw this and failed. Leonardo solved it by letting the two figures overlap with different centres: the square is centred near the groin, the circle on the navel.
The text around the figure is his reworking of Vitruvius: four fingers make a palm, four palms a foot, six palms a cubit, four cubits a man's height, and the span of a man's arms equals his height. Small ticks along the arms and body mark the divisions he measured.
The sheet is pen and ink over metalpoint, about 34 by 25 centimetres, and it is so fragile that the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice shows it only rarely.
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by Mei Lin 