What does Da Vinci mean by this painting?

It's a familiar image to many: a nude, middle-aged, fit man with his arms raised at a slight angle and his legs splayed out,

The Vitruvian Man

The Vitruvian Man

The Vitruvian Man

has his head, feet, and fingers at the ends of an exact outer circle. At the same time, another image is clearly visible superimposed on the painting: a man standing with his arms outstretched, with his head, feet, and fingers as the endpoints of a square. This is the famous painting "Vitruvian Man" (HomoVitruvianus), from the Renaissance art master Da Vinci's hand, the title of the painting is based on the name of the outstanding Roman architect Vitruvius (Vitruvii), the architect in his book "Architecture ten books" has praised the human body proportions and the golden section.

About Vitruvius's life and architectural activities, it is difficult to verify due to the limitation of historical materials. Only from the "Architecture Ten Books" sporadic records know, Vitruvius was born into a rich family, well educated in culture and engineering technology, familiar with the Greek language, can directly read the relevant literature. He was a learned man who knew a great deal about construction, municipal, mechanical and military technology, and also studied geometry, physics, astronomy, philosophy, history, aesthetics, music and other aspects of knowledge. He served two rulers, Julius Caesar and Augustus, as an architect and engineer, and was honored for his architectural works.

The Vitruvian Man was also modeled after the most accurately proportioned male, and was often described as "perfectly proportioned. [1]

Creation background

From Vitruvius's discussion in the book, it appears that he was talking about the balance of the temple, which in turn was derived from the proportions. Architects of the Roman period believed that proportion was the method by which equilibrium was produced in all architecture by the obedience of the minutiae and the whole to a certain modulus. "Indeed, without equilibrium or proportion, there could be no place for any temple. That is, similar to a beautifully posed human body, it is necessary to have correctly distributed limbs" (see Ten Books of Architecture - Book III). It is on the basis of his knowledge of human proportions that Vitruvius emphasizes, "If nature constitutes the human body so that the limbs correspond in proportion to the whole of its composite appearance, then the ancients seem to have had a basis for prescribing that in the completion of a building the individual minutiae should be kept correct in measurement with respect to the whole of the outward appearance."

The Ten Books of Architecture were written in Latin in the form of a petition to the Roman Emperor Augustus, but unfortunately the original text was soon lost, and only the codex was handed down. 1414, a codex of the book was found in a Swiss monastery, and it provided intellectual nourishment and inspiration for Renaissance scholars, as did a variety of other resurrected Graeco-Roman writings, as well as field studies and restorations by architects of the Roman monuments. ruins to do field research and restoration. There was even the establishment of the Vitruvian Academy, which made the ideas of Vitruvius played an important role in architectural research and popularization of knowledge.

Obviously, Da Vinci had read the Ten Books of Architecture and had the insight to link the biological basis of beauty (form and proportion) with the knowledge of geometry (squares and circles), making the Vitruvian Man perfect in his brilliant writing.

The Vitruvian Man's proportional subtlety and harmony was so well received that it has been passed down from generation to generation, and today it is a modern cultural icon, appearing on posters, mouse pads, and T-shirts all over the world. Not only that, the Vitruvian Man has also become a source of inspiration for modern artists and writers. 1989, a Western artist used a robot as a model to create the Vitruvian Robot, with the posture and proportions of the robot, but with a metal skeleton replacing the flesh and blood. 2003, a popular American novel called The Da Vinci Code (translated and published domestically and even on the charts), which talks about a man who was born in the middle of the night in a French museum in the Louvre. At midnight, the elderly curator of the Louvre Museum in France was murdered on the floor of a large art gallery. In the last moments of his life, the curator stripped naked, posed his body unmistakably as the famous painting The Vitruvian Man, and left a puzzling cipher next to the body. [2]

Creation after editing

The film of the same name, based on Dan Brown's best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, was released worldwide to widespread attention.

The Vitruvian Man

The Vitruvian Man

The first cipher in the book "The Da Vinci Code" is the stylized version of Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting "The Vitruvian Man", which was placed by the director of the Louvre Museum in Paris before he died.

Leonardo da Vinci was the most versatile of all the great Renaissance artists, not only a painter, cartographer, inventor, anatomist, musician and philosopher. He was also one of the most enigmatic. Although his great works have made Da Vinci a household name over the centuries, the man himself has always remained an enigma and a source of curiosity to the world. And much of his life is unknown.

The Flying Mind: A Biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Charles Nicholl (published by Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House) provides a fascinating insight into the multifaceted, creative, and endlessly exploratory mind behind the legendary Renaissance genius and all-around human being. This book paints a most compelling and intimate portrait of the multifaceted, creative, and endlessly searching individual behind the legendary "Renaissance genius" and "omnipotent man". The book traces Leonardo's extraordinary life story, including his creation of The Vitruvian Man.

The earliest sketches and notes identifying Leonardo da Vinci's interest in anatomy were made in the late 1580s. These sketches and notes are only the beginning of one of his most far-reaching achievements. In terms of his actual contributions or influence, he achieved much more in anatomy than he did in engineering, invention, and architecture. His drawings of the human body and the related notes he recorded were more rigorous and accurate than what had been accomplished in this area by his predecessors. His anatomical sketches of the human body provided entirely new views for revealing the organs of the human body, just as his mechanical sketches did in relation to machines. Undertaking such explorations requires tenacity and courage, is hampered by traditional taboos and challenged by dogmatists, and involves disgusting dissections in tight time frames before the body cools. Leonardo's dissections reflected his "courageous practice" philosophy, a dissection and reappraisal of the universally accepted wisdom of the philosophers - Galen, Hippocrates and Aristotle - who still dominated the medical establishment at the time.

The conventional wisdom was that anatomy was too quaint because man was born in the likeness of God and therefore could not be dismantled like a machine. The early humanist Coluche Salutati wrote that anatomy reveals "what nature has been carefully concealing" and that "I do not believe that anyone can look into the depths of the human body without weeping." On at least one occasion Leonardo's anatomical activities brought himself into confrontation with the Church. It was in Rome in 1515, when a man of ill intent "did everything he could to prevent me from performing the dissection, not only by publicly accusing me before the pope, but also by haranguing me in the hospital."

Da Vinci's anatomical activities were scientific research, but they were also closely linked to the field of art, and anatomy brought science and art

The Vitruvian Man

The Vitruvian Man

closer together, or showed that there was no distance at all between the two. Anatomy, like geometry and math, is the basis of painting. Underneath an anatomical drawing of the nerves of the neck and shoulder, Leonardo wrote: "This form of representation is as important to a good painter as it is for a good grammarian to know the Latin origin of words." Do you remember that in The Last Supper Leonardo used the taut and twisted neck muscles of his characters to represent the dramatic moment of the time? Leonardo's interest in anatomy, like his interest in optics a little later, was an inevitable consequence of his work as a painter, or perhaps more accurately, of his teaching of the art of painting to his disciples and apprentices in his Milanese workshop. The ideal of the "painter-philosopher" arose, and Leonardo's art was based on his profound scientific knowledge of the objects he depicted. From this point on, he began to write pamphlets and monographs, which after his death were included in his great Discourses on Painting.

Da Vinci used coordinate squares to find out the actual location of the human soul

Da Vinci may have studied anatomy with Verrocchio. Florentine styles of artistic expression in the 1570s, such as Antonio del Bolevolo's paintings and Verrocchio's sculptures, were strongly characterized by the detail and drama of human anatomy. Bolewolo had made a very detailed study of human muscles, which was obviously carried out with the aid of dissection, and he subsequently created his famous Naked Man at War. Leonardo would have known the Florentine anatomist Antonio Benivini, and the two may have known each other; Benivini was also a friend of Lorenzo de' Medici. Benivini studied the functioning of the heart and other internal organs, but his main interest was in dissecting corpses after execution, looking for in vivo representations of criminal behavior. His monograph, "Hidden Causes," recounts his findings after performing 20 such dissections.

The Vitruvian Man

The Vitruvian Man

Perhaps there were other anatomical influences in Florence, but it was in Milan that Leonardo's interest in anatomy was at its strongest, and in 1489 he intended to publish a "book" on the subject. In 1489 Leonardo had intended to produce a "book" on the subject, which was actually a handwritten monograph. There is some textual evidence for this: there are some surviving drafts and lists of contents, one of which is dated April 2, 1489, and Leonardo later gave the project a new name. Leonardo later titled the planned book On the Form of the Human Body, proving once again the relationship between anatomy and painting.

In 1489, at the age of 36, Leonardo began to think about the world's universal symbol of death: the human skull. On three pages hidden in the Royal Library at Windsor, he depicted eight exercises on the skull, with side views, cross-sections, and oblique views of the skull from above. The sketches are skillfully and exquisitely drawn, beautifully shaded and mysteriously grotesque. Different angles were chosen for different exercises - some depicted the blood vessels of the face, some indicated the relationship between the eye sockets and the jawbone, and others looked down into the cavity of the skull and depicted the nerves and blood vessels within the skull. But his main interest in drawing these exercises appeared in the notes alongside the paintings. His interest was not in scientific research, but in metaphysics. One of the skull exercises was drawn to scale in a square, and Leonardo wrote in the margin, "Where the line a-m intersects the line c-b is where the senses meet."

Here he deliberately emphasized that "the place where the senses meet" is what Aristotle had assumed to be the "*** general sense". The "*** general sense" is known as the most important of the three "ventricles" of the brain, the other two being the "impression area" for the collection of raw sensory data, and the "memory area" for the collection of raw sensory data, and the other being the "memory area". The other two are the "impression area," which collects raw sensory data, and the "memory area," which stores processed information.

The "****tongue" thus becomes the source of reason, fantasy, intellect, and even the soul. Leonardo said:

It seems that the soul resides in this organ ...... called the "****usceptor". The "****tongue" is not spread all over the body, as many think, but should be concentrated in one place, for if the soul were everywhere, the senses would not need to be brought together ......Therefore the "****tongue" is the soul, which is the source of the ****tongue. *The "sense of communication" is the place of the soul.

If taken literally, the unusual thought occurs that Leonardo used a coordinate grid to find the actual location of the human soul in Windsor's scaled skull exercise, as shown above. It seems too simple to draw such a conclusion. Leonardo is actually asking questions, not getting to conclusions.

The Vitruvian Man became one of the most famous sketches in the world

On the back of a skull exercise he left the date: April 2, 1489, with a list of items to be studied. The list begins with those relating to the human head and face, and then moves to the skull section:Which tendons cause the movement of the eyes so that the movement of one eye leads to the movement of the other? And which tendons cause frowning. ......

The scope of his questions suddenly broadened, moving from the muscle movements of laughter and expressions of surprise, to a sudden shift, describing the origins of man, how man came to be in the womb, and why eight-month-old babies can't survive outside of the body:Why do people sneeze. Why do people yawn ......

He then turns to the body's tendons and muscular system - "the tendons that make the shoulders to the elbows move," "the tendons that make the thighs move," and so on.

The study of On the Form of the Human Body was accompanied by a series of sketches that showed the proportions of the human body in planes, demonstrating the mathematical ratios between the organs of the body. Here again Leonardo was influenced by Vitruvius. Vitruvius was a great Roman architect and military engineer of the first century A.D., and his writings alone set forth the theory and practice of harmonious proportions of the human body. Some of Leonardo's sketches on this subject are in the Royal Library at Windsor; they were made around 1490, and others have been lost, but some facsimiles are included in The Huygens Codex, a codex compiled in the second half of the 16th century, presumably by the Milanese artist Girolamo Ficino, who was a disciple of Leonardo's early assistant, Francesco Melzi, and thus had access to the large collection of Leonardo's works collected by Melzi. access to the extensive Leonardo collection collected by Merz.

The most famous of these human scale exercises, and indeed one of the most famous sketches in the world, is the sketch known as The Vitruvian Man, also known as Sacred Proportions, which has become an icon of Leonardo and his ambitions. Like most works of repute, this one is often explored in the spotlight of reputation alone, rather than considered in the context of its birth.

The Vitruvian Man is a pen-and-ink sketch on a large sheet of paper (13.5 x 9.5 inches) that is now in the Academy Gallery in Venice. It is probably in Venice because Fra Giocondo printed a folio of Vitruvius's works in Venice in 1511, which contained an engraving after the sketch. Above and below the sketch are small handwritten letters. The words above the drawing read:

The architect Vitruvius, in his work on architecture, said that nature had arranged the proportions of the human body as follows: four fingers to a palm, four palms to a foot, six palms to a wrist, four elbows to a foot, four elbows to a foot, four elbows to a foot, four elbows to a foot, four elbows to a foot, four elbows to a wrist, four elbows to a foot, four elbows to a wrist, and four elbows to a wrist. The foot is the whole body. ......

These human proportions are excerpted from Vitruvius' Ten Books of Architecture, Volume 3, Chapter 1, and are written in increasing detail later in the book: "The length from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger of the hand is one-fifth of the height of the person; and that from the elbow to the armpit one-eighth of the height. ...... "Below the sketch is a scale in fingers and palms.

The drawing depicts a man in two distinctly different poses, which correspond to two sentences in the drawing. The pose with the feet together and the arms horizontally outstretched illustrates the following quote from the sketch: "The width of a man's outstretched arms is equal to his height." The person in the drawing is thus placed in a square with each side equal to 96 finger lengths (or 24 palm lengths). The other person spans his legs and raises his arms a little higher, expressing a more specialized version of Vitruvius' law:

If you span your legs so that your height is reduced by one-fourteenth, and your arms are extended and raised until the tip of your middle finger is at the same level as the highest part of your head, you will find that the center of your stretched-out limbs is your navel, and that an equilateral triangle will be formed between your legs.

The person in this pose in the painting is encased in a circle, and his navel is the center of the circle.

Artistic Appeal Edit

One of the charms of this sketch is the interplay between abstract geometry and observed physical reality. The body of the man in the drawing is drawn with only a few major parts, but it is beautifully contoured and muscular. The man's feet actually seem to be either on top of the bottom edge of a square or against the arc of a circle. The two poses give the impression of movement, perhaps that of a gymnast, and are actually a man swinging his arms up and down, as a bird swings its wings. The lines of the human body are clear and simple, but the face is treated a little differently. The face is drawn a little deeper, with more dramatic shadows: it is a face staring angrily ahead.

One might wonder if this Vitruvian Man is the author's self-portrait. On second thought, perhaps not, since the sketch was made in 1490 and the man looks far older than 38. Another possibility is that the face explains the proportions of the human body described in subsequent texts, such as the distance from the root of the hair to the eyebrow being equal to the distance from the tip of the chin to the mouth. In this sense, the face is perfect and serves as a model. Yet the painting seems to be a perfect illustration of the above abstract laws of symmetry in biological geometry, so that the man in the circle with the serious expression seems like he should be a big man, not a nobody. He has deep-set eyes, a sharp gaze, and long, thick, curly hair that is parted down the middle. At least I would say that this Vitruvian Man carries an element of self-portrait, which embodies the natural harmony of the man, and likewise the only person who could understand these truths - the artist, anatomist, and architect Leonardo da Vinci.