Why Vitruvian Man is considered one of the greatest works of Leonardo D Vinci
Why Vitruvian Man is
considered one of the best works of Leonardo D Vinci!
Vitruvian Man is considered one of the greatest masterpieces
of Leonardo the Vinci who was the most prestigious artist of his time. It is
named as Vitruvian man because it was made based on the works of a famous
Mathematician named Vitruvius. It was not a wall painting or a canvas painting
but just a sketch which was found in the notebook of Leonardo d Vinci. There
were several notes written above and below the painting which described the
concept on which the Vitruvian man was made. To understand the meaning of this
wonderful art, we first need to understand about a magical number PHI. Do not
confuse it with PI which we use to find areas related to circles. The Vitruvian
Man is based on this number also acknowledged as the divine proportion by many.
Let us see some details about PHI to understand it clearly. The
value of PHI is 1.61803. It looks just like any other ordinary decimal number.
So, what is so special about this number that we are talking so much about it?
It was also known as the “golden mean”, “golden section” or “golden ratio”. It was known and
was referred in most of the places as “The Divine Proportion”. Phi with an upper case “P” is 1.618
0339 887 and phi with a lower case “p” is 0.6180339887. Lower case p is
the reciprocal of PHI as well as PHI – 1.
The most interesting thing about this number is that it could
be derived from nature. The plants, the animals, the numbers, the humans, the
science, the music and even the universe show us the importance of PHI. Its
role is like a fundamental building block in nature. We can have numerous examples but let us
discuss a few.
The female bees outnumber the male bees in any beehive in the
world…If we divide the number of female bees to the number of male bees of any
beehive we always get the same number, PHI. When we take the ratio of the
radius of the outer spiral of a sunflower to the inner spiral, guess which
number we get – PHI! Are you aware of the Fibonacci series? It goes like this –
1 1 2 3 5 8 13… We get the next number in the series by taking the sum of
previous two numbers. But do you know what is special about it? The ratio o any
number to its previous numbers as we move ahead in the series is equal to PHI!
I hope I have given enough examples to emphasize the importance of this number.
Now, we can move ahead and understand the concepts of THE VITRUVIAN MAN.
Da Vinci actually exhumed corpses to measure the exact
proportions of human bone structure. He took various measurements and then took
out the symmetry in structure and also its relation to the divine proportion-
PHI. You can check for yourself. Take an inch tape and measure the distance
from your head to toe and then divide this measurement by the distance from naval
point to the floor. PHI!!! You can also
check the ratios between the distances from your shoulder to your fingertips to
the distance from your elbows to your fingertips. It will again give you PHI!
Each one of us is a walking tribute to the DIVINE PROPORTION. The Vitruvian Man
is basically a drawing of a human body inside a square and a circle. It
beautifully depicts the symmetry of Human body and its correlation with
universe with the help of PHI. We could easily witness several T-shirts, lunch
boxes, pencil boxes, with the print of this art.
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