Vitruvius' "Ten Books on Architecture", Leonardo da Vinci, and...Vitruvian Man

"The Other Vitruvian Man"

Was Leonardo da Vinci's famous anatomical chart actually a collaborative effort?

by

Toby Lester

February 2012

Smithsonian

In 1986, during a visit to the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, in Ferrara, Italy, an architect named Claudio Sgarbi called up an anonymous copy of the Ten Books on Architecture, written by the Roman architect Vitruvius. The only such treatise to have survived from antiquity, the Ten Books is a classic, studied by historians of architecture and antiquity alike. Early copies are of great interest to scholars, but few had any idea this one existed. Academic inventories made no mention of it, and the Ariostea catalog described it unpromisingly as only a partial manuscript.

When Sgarbi took a look at it, he discovered, to his amazement, that in fact it contained almost the full text of the Ten Books, along with 127 drawings. Moreover, it showed every sign of having been produced during the late 1400s, years before anyone was known to have systematically illustrated the work. “I was totally astonished,” Sgarbi told me. But then he made what he calls “a discovery within the discovery”: On the manuscript’s 78th folio, he found a drawing that gave him the chills. It depicted a nude figure inside a circle and a square—and it looked uncannily like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

Everybody knows Leonardo’s drawing. It has become familiar to the point of banality. When Leonardo drew it, however, he was at work on something new: the attempt to illustrate the idea, set down by Vitruvius in the Ten Books, that the human body can be made to fit inside a circle and a square.

This was more than a geometrical statement. Ancient thinkers had long invested the circle and the square with symbolic powers. The circle represented the cosmic and the divine; the square, the earthly and the secular. Anyone proposing that a man could be made to fit inside both shapes was making a metaphysical proposition: The human body wasn’t just designed according to the principles that governed the world; it was the world, in miniature. This was the theory of the microcosm, and Leonardo hitched himself to it early in his career. “By the ancients,” he wrote around 1492, “man was termed a lesser world, and certainly the use of this name is well bestowed, because ...his body is an analogue for the world.”

But what should this microcosmic man look like? Vitruvius hadn’t provided illustrations. Artists in medieval Europe, loosely echoing Vitruvius, had come up with visions of their ideal man: Christ on the cross, representing both the human and the divine. But until the late 1400s, nobody had tried to work out exactly how a man with Vitruvian proportions might be inscribed inside a circle and a square. This was the challenge that prompted Leonardo to draw Vitruvian Man.

He wasn’t the first to try. The earliest known effort, by the architect Francesco di Giorgio Martini, came in the 1480s, but it was more dreamy than precise, and in several respects failed to correspond to Vitruvius’ specifications: most notably, the one dictating that the navel should appear at the center of the circle.

Leonardo’s solution was to de-center the circle and the square—or at least people thought this was his solution until Claudio Sgarbi came along. Sgarbi, a Modena-based architectural historian, initially assumed the drawing in the Ferrara library had to be a copy of Leonardo’s because the correspondences between the two were too close to be coincidental. But as he studied the drawing, Sgarbi discovered it to be full of false starts and corrections—none of which would have been necessary had its illustrator been copying Leonardo. This led him to a startling thought: Perhaps the Ferrara picture had come first.

But who was this anonymous artist, and what was his relationship to Leonardo?

After years of study, Sgarbi thinks he has the answer. In a volume of academic papers to be published this winter by the Italian publisher Marsilio, he proposes that the author was a young architect named Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara.

What little is known about Giacomo Andrea derives primarily from a remark made in On Divine Proportion (1498), by Luca Pacioli, who described him as both a dear friend of Leonardo’s and an expert on Vitruvius. Leonardo himself records in his notes having had dinner with Giacomo Andrea in 1490, the year Leonardo is thought to have drawn Vitruvian Man. And elsewhere Leonardo mentions “Giacomo Andrea’s Vitruvius”—a direct reference, Sgarbi believes, to the Ferrara manuscript. “Everything started to fit perfectly, like in a puzzle,” he told me.

Sgarbi’s hunch is that Leonardo and Giacomo Andrea collaborated on their drawings, but few traces of Giacomo Andrea survive, and unearthing more, enough to make Sgarbi’s case definitively, may take years. Still, scholars already find it intriguing. The French historian Pierre Gros, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Vitruvius, says he considers the idea “seductive and convincing.”

One of the few other known references to Giacomo Andrea concerns his death. In 1499 the French occupied Milan, where he and Leonardo had lived since the 1480s. Already admired internationally, Leonardo established cordial relations with the French and safely fled the city. But Giacomo Andrea wasn’t so lucky. He apparently stayed on as a kind of resistance fighter, and the French captured, hanged and quartered him the following year. “Because of his loyalty to the Duke of Milan,” Sgarbi says, “Giacomo Andrea was erased from history”—as was his Vitruvian Man.

[Toby Lester’s new book, Da Vinci’s Ghost, is about the history behind Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.]

Da Vinci’s Ghost

by

Toby Lester

ISBN-10: 1439189234
ISBN-13: 978-1439189234

Thanks to POSP stringer Tim.

Physics, art--Leonardo style

Particle events depicted as books. The few stacked neatly in piles are events selected by the CMS high-level trigger system for further study; more than 99 percent have been rejected and tossed in a pile.

"Channeling da Vinci"

A physicist sketches science in the style of an old master.

by

Lisa McCarthy

Symmetry

Sergio Cittolin is first and foremost a physicist in search of answers to the mysteries of the universe. Yet he also has an artistic bent, and his talent for drawing has woven itself nicely into his 30 years of work at CERN. The result is a collection of Leonardo da Vinci-style illustrations that brighten CERN hallways, a book, and the covers of a number of technical documents.

Cittolin has been an incessant doodler since his early years in Vittorio Veneto, Italy. He has sketched his way through school lectures and professional meetings. Now in charge of trigger and data acquisition for the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, he tends to chair meetings rather than just attend them; "This has made it more difficult to find the time to sketch," he admits.

In 1992 the first of Cittolin’s da Vinci-style drawings appeared on the cover of a CMS experiment design report. With collider operations still years away and key technologies not yet invented, "I thought that the Leonardo style was suitable to give the feeling of anticipation of new ideas," he says. "Da Vinci was the father of all engineers and described many of his inventions a long time before technology was ready to realize them."

As a naturalist, da Vinci probed, prodded, and tested his way to a deeper understanding of how organisms work and why, often dissecting his object of study with this aim. "I thought, why not present the idea of data analysis to the world within the naturalist world of Leonardo?" Cittolin says. In the drawing below, the CMS detector is the organism to be opened; the particles passing through it and the tracks they leave behind are organs exposed for further investigation.

Cittolin brings a sense of humor to his work. For example, after betting CMS colleague Ariella Cattai that he could produce a quality drawing for the cover of the CMS tracker technical proposal by a given deadline, he included in the drawing a secret message in mirror-image writing—which was also a favorite of da Vinci's. The message jokingly demanded a particular reward for his hard work. The completed picture was delivered on time and within a few hours Cattai cleverly spotted and deciphered the message. She promptly presented him with the requested bottle of wine.

Paris Sphicas, physics coordinator for the CMS experiment, says of Cittolin's artwork, "The graphics are amazing in numerous ways. Foremost is the depiction of modern-day systems and actions in terms of medieval elements: the tons of data are drawn as piles of books; lasers become oil lamps; complicated systems, typically electronic, find mechanical analogs which are ingeniously conceived. Second, all these elements are combined in a way that the drawing gives, literally, a very short summary of what takes about 500 pages to describe. Third, it’s the art itself: it's all drawn in the da Vinci style. From the text—which, of course, reads backwards and can only be deciphered in front of a mirror—to the line technique, the drawings look and feel like genuine works of Leonardo himself."

Even with 10 technical manual covers to his credit, having his illustrations published in The Particle Odyssey by Oxford University Press, and seeing his artwork exhibited on the walls of CERN, Cittolin is all about the physics. "The biggest pleasure is to complete what I’ve started and see it working at the LHC," he says. "It is a real adventure to build something so unique and maybe fundamental."

As for his drawings, Cittolin modestly insists that they are "just pictures," adding, "Maybe I will find more time to draw in retirement."

Like a body on the anatomy table, the detector is dissected to extract information about particle events.

One slice of the CMS detector is cut away to expose the magnet coil.

In the first stage of sifting particle events to find the most interesting ones, algorithms in a two-dimensional matrix are used to identify electrons, jets and muons.

A drawing of the innermost part of the CMS detector, bristling with silicon tiles, took inspiration from the nine circles of hell in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.

The CMS detector is lowered into the experimental hall.

Gavin Menzies--back at it again

Gavin Menzies

Leonardo da Vinci

Gavin Menzies is at it again...this time claiming that "Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of machines are uncannily similar to Chinese originals and were undoubtedly derived from them...." in his new book 1434: The Year A Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed To Italy and Ignited The Renaissance. His last historical failure was the subject of a PBS two part series "Zheng He's Expedition" where he claimed the possibility of a Chinese fleet circumnavigating the Earth and particularly visiting North America's northeast coast line.

The story goes like this. Time: 15th Century China. Expeditions were commissioned by the Ming Emperor Zhu Di and commanded admiral Zheng He. A large flotilla was set into movement discovering denizens from the coats of China to the tip of Africa. Trade flourished and these expeditions are well documented. The proposed hypothesis by Gavin Menzies takes off when the fleet leaves the Cape of Good Hope, sails up the western coast of Africa, and takes advantage of trade winds and ocean currents to arrive in the Caribbean, up the eastern American coast, up to Greenland, and throughout the rest of the world. So the story goes and Gavin Menzies offers evidence. Maybe. Not one shred of evidence can be verified to support such a claim.

Now one can enter "Gavin Menzies" into one's favorite search engine and find a lot of material debunking his assertions.

And now he is currently drawing attention to the authenticity of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings.

"Columbus debunker sets sights on Leonardo da Vinci"

by

Tim Castle

July 29th, 2008

Reuters

Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of machines are uncannily similar to Chinese originals and were undoubtedly derived from them, a British amateur historian says in a newly-published book.

Gavin Menzies sparked headlines across the globe in 2002 with the claim that Chinese sailors reached America 70 years before Christopher Columbus.

Now he says a Chinese fleet brought encyclopedias of technology undiscovered by the West to Italy in 1434, laying the foundation for the engineering marvels such as flying machines later drawn by Italian polymath Leonardo.

"Everything known to the Chinese by the year 1430 was brought to Venice," said Menzies, a retired Royal Navy submarine commander, in an interview at his north London home.

From Venice, a Chinese ambassador went to Florence and presented the material to Pope Eugenius IV, Menzies says.

"I argue in the book that this was the spark that really ignited the renaissance and that Leonardo and (Italian astronomer) Galileo built on what was brought to them by the Chinese.

"Leonardo basically redrew everything in three dimensions, which made a vast improvement."

If accepted, the claim would force an "agonizing reappraisal of the Eurocentric view of history", Menzies says in his book "1434: The Year A Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed To Italy and Ignited The Renaissance".

NONSENSE

The urbane 70-year-old sold more than a million copies of his first book, "1421", which argued Chinese sailors mapped the world in the early 1400s shortly before abandoning global seafaring.

His theories are dismissed as nonsense by many academics -- Menzies says Chinese fleets reached Australia and New Zealand as well as America before European explorers -- but have gained an international following among readers.

"This whole fantasy about Europe discovering the world is just nonsense," said Menzies.

In his latest book -- published in the United States in June and this month in Britain -- Menzies says four ships from the same Chinese expeditions reached Venice, bringing with them world maps, astronomical charts and encyclopedias far in advance of anything available in Europe at the time.

Menzies says Leonardo's designs for machines can be traced back to this transfer of Chinese knowledge.

Leonardo, born in 1452, is perhaps best known for his enigmatic "Mona Lisa" portrait of a woman in Paris's Louvre Museum, but he also left journals filled with intricate engineering and anatomical illustrations.

Menzies says designs for gears, waterwheels and other devices contained in Chinese encyclopedias reached Leonardo after being copied and modified by his Italian antecedents Taccola and Francesco di Giorgio.

To support his argument, Menzies publishes drawings of siege weapons, mills and pumps from a 1313 Chinese agricultural treatise, the Nung Shu, and from other pre-1430 Chinese books, next to apparently similar illustrations by Leonardo, Di Giorgio and Taccola.

"By comparing Leonardo's drawings with the Nung Shu we have verified that each element of a machine superbly illustrated by Leonardo had previously been illustrated by the Chinese in a much simpler manual," Menzies writes.

"It's very suggestive, very interesting, but the hard work remains to be done," said Martin Kemp, Professor of the History of Art at Oxford University and author of books on Leonardo.

"He (Menzies) says something is a copy just because they look similar. He says two things are almost identical when they are not," Kemp said.

"It's not strong on historical method," he added. But Kemp said he would look out for any signs that Leonardo had access to Chinese material, directly or indirectly, when studying his manuscripts in future.

COMPLICATED

"I will keep my eye open, without thinking it is going to turn Leonardo studies or any studies of 15th century technology upside down."

Kemp said the source of the claimed Chinese influence was a separate issue.

"There is a whole series of questions a historian would ask about mediaeval technology, about Islamic technology, about transmission across trade routes, the Silk Route in particular.

"It's a terrifically complicated area and having a Chinese person in Florence in 1434 ends up giving that person a hell of a lot of work to do."

Menzies bases his claim that a Chinese ambassador went to Florence on a copy of a letter dated 1474 by Italian mathematician Toscanelli found among Columbus's papers.

Menzies publishes a translation from the letter reading: "In the days of Pope Eugenius there came a Chinese ambassador to him," although this is not explicit in the original Latin text.

"It's drivel", said Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, a British expert on maritime exploration who is a professor of history at Tufts University in the United States and at Queen Mary College, University of London.

"No reputable scholar would think that there is any reason to suppose that the person referred to by Toscanelli was Chinese," he told Reuters.

Geoff Wade, a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore's Asia Research Institute, said Menzies' book and theories should be reclassified as historical fiction.

"Certainly Chinese ideas came to Europe and European ideas went to Iran and onwards," Wade said in a telephone interview.

"But the premise of the book that there was a Chinese fleet in 1434 which went to Italy is completely without any substance.

"There is absolutely no Chinese evidence for it."

Menzies brushes off the criticism, pointing to shelves of files in the rooms of his basement study filled with material he says supports his theories, much contributed by readers of his books and associated Web sites.

"I say the claim that critics make that there is no evidence is absolute rubbish. There is stacks and stacks of evidence.

"It's not me that's the fantasist, it's the historians who persist in this complete rubbish which is currently taught as history."

1421: The Year China Discovered America

ISBN-10: 0060537639
ISBN-13: 978-0060537630

1434: The Year A Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed To Italy and Ignited The Renaissance

ISBN-10: 0061492175
ISBN-13: 978-0061492174

Leonardo da Vinci...extraordinary individual

Machine for Digging Trenches

The bucket of this digger is operated via the instantaneous release of the balance weight. The large rocking half-wheel helps lift the excavating bucket and lower the balance weight. The operation is repeated until the bucket digs down into the ditch. Then the digger is hauled on for excavating a new stretch.

And another stellar web site on a special individual--Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo