THAT DA VINCI DRAWING OF A GUY IN A CIRCLE

I'll confess, I was familiar with the werewolf version from Harry Potter before even knowing it was a rip-off of Da Vinci's most famous drawing. The image is reproduced and reimagined liberally, but what is the significance of the original?

The anatomical sketch and surrounding notes is called "the Vitruvian Man", sometimes referred to as "Proportions of Man".

Vitruvius Pollio is not the man depicted, rather a famed roman architect, civil engineer, and author, living approximately 1500 years prior to the drawing of Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man" (drawn c.1487). It's got nothing to do with werewolves (unfortunately), but explores the intersection of geometry, anatomy, and aesthetics.

THE SHAPES

As we know, back in ancient Babylon, they had nothing to do but sit around all day and think about shapes and numbers. In that time, a problem was proposed which stumped mathematicians all the way through to the Renaissance and beyond, before finally being declared impossible in 1882. The problem, called "squaring the circle" asks:

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Given a circle with a known area, how do you find the side length of a square with exactly the same area?

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Da Vinci's drawing does not set out to resolve the problem, rather it draws a relationships between the dimensions of a circle and a square using the ideal dimensions of the human body. The drawing demonstrates that, a circle can be drawn around the human body in which the naval is the exact centre, and that a square can be drawn around the body to show that arm span and height are equal.

THE NOTES

The surrounding notes go on to describe the ideal human proportions, which are then displayed in the drawing. Vitruvius, like Da Vinci believed that beauty can quantified, and the perfect proportions discovered, through studying nature. While Vitruvius mainly applied these perfect proportions to architecture, his writing about the proportions of the human body is what inspired Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man".

The drawing explores several areas of study which were being revolutionised by "Renaissance Men" such as Da Vinci at the time. It draws links between religion, anatomy, beauty, maths, even architecture. It truly illustrates Da Vinci's belief that "Everything connects to everything else".