Did Leonardo da Vinci copy his famous 'Vitruvian Man'?

By Natalie Wolchover
updated 1/31/2012 11:07:31 AM ET

Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of a male figure perfectly inscribed in a circle and square, known as the "Vitruvian Man," illustrates what he believed to be a divine connection between the human form and the universe. Beloved for its beauty and symbolic power, it is one of the most famous images in the world. However, new research suggests that the work, which dates to 1490, may be a copy of an earlier drawing by Leonardo's friend. Another illustration of a divinely proportioned man the subject is Christ-like, but the setting is strikingly similar to Leonardo's has been discovered in a forgotten manuscript in Ferrara, Italy. Both drawings are depictions of a passage written 1,500 years earlier by Vitruvius, an ancient Roman architect, in which he describes a man's body fitting perfectly inside a circle (the divine symbol) and inside a square (the earthly symbol). It was a geometric interpretation of the ancient belief that man is a "microcosm": a miniature embodiment

of the whole universe. Leonardo and other scholars revived this vainglorious notion during the Italian Renaissance. After decades of study, Claudio Sgarbi, an Italian architectural historian who discovered the lesser known illustration of the Vitruvian man in 1986, now believes it to be the work of Giacomo Andrea de Ferrara, a Renaissance architect, expert on Vitruvius, and close friend of Leonardo's. What's more, Sgarbi believes Giacomo Andrea probably drew his Vitruvian man first, though the two men are likely to have discussed their mutual efforts. Sgarbi will lay out his arguments in a volume of academic papers to be published this winter, Smithsonian Magazine reports. The key arguments are as follows: In Leonardo's writings, he mentions "Giacomo Andrea's Vitruvius" seemingly a direct reference to the illustrated Ferrara manuscript. Secondly, Leonardo had dinner with Giacomo Andrea in July 1490, the year in which both men are thought to have drawn their Vitruvian men. Experts believe Leonardo would have probed Giacomo Andrea's knowledge of Vitruvius when they met. And though both drawings interpret Vitruvius' words similarly, Leonardo's is perfectly executed, while Giacomo Andrea's is full of false starts and revisions, none of which would have been necessary if he had simply copied Leonardo's depiction. [Early Christian Lead Codices Now Called Fakes] Other scholars find the arguments convincing. "I find Sgarbi's argument exciting and very seductive, to say the least," said Indra McEwen, an architectural historian at Concordia University who has written extensively

about the works of Vitruvius. "But [I] would opt for the view that Giacomo Andrea and Leonardo worked in tandem, rather than Leonardo basing his drawing on Andrea's." Rather than competitors, the two Renaissance men were colleagues working together to bring a beautiful, ancient idea back to life. "Whose was the 'original' drawing is a non-question as far as I'm concerned. Much as it is a preoccupation of our own time, I don't think it would have been an issue in Leonardo's day," McEwen told Life's Little Mysteries. Patrice Le Floch-Prigent, an anatomist at the University of Versailles in France who has analyzed the anatomical correctness of Leonardo's famous work, noted that, for both drawings, "the source is Vitruvius." Furthermore, regardless of their chronology, Leonardo's work is an improvement on Giacomo Andrea's, McEwen said: "Leonardo is by far the superior draftsman, with a far superior understanding of anatomy." Leonardo's is also more faithful to the text, she explained. "Nowhere does Vitruvius say that the man is positioned inside the circle and the square at the same time. 'A man lying flat on his back, can be circumscribed by a circle if his hands and feet are outstretched,' writes Vitruvius. Similarly, his height is equal to his arm span, 'just as in areas that have been squared with a set square.'" Giacomo Andrea's figure has only one set of arms and legs, which are simultaneously circumscribed by a circle and outlined by a square, while "Leonardo deals with [the two

propositions] by having the position of his man's arms and legs change. That, I would have to admit, makes his drawing a closer approximation to the textual description than Giacomo Andrea's," McEwen wrote. One thing is certain. The better Vitruvian man gained international fame, while the simpler but possibly more original one was left to languish in a library for five centuries. That may have to do with the very different fates met by Leonardo and Giacomo Andrea. When the French invaded Milan in 1499, the former fled to safety and went on to achieve eternal renown. The latter stayed in Milan and was hanged, drawn and quartered by the French, and largely forgotten by history until now.

Bibliography
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46204318

The Other Vitruvian Man

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

Smithsonian magazine, February 2012

Claudio Sgarbi says he "was totally astonished" when he examined a manuscript including a drawing that seemed to prefigure Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.

Vitruvian Man (C. 1490), Giacomo Andrea Da Ferrara, Biblioteca Ariostea, Ferrara (Cart. Sec. XVI, Fol. Figurato, Classe II, N. 176, Fol 78V)

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 manuscripts 78th folio, he found a drawing that gave him the chills. It depicted a nude figure inside a circle and a squareand it looked uncannily like Leonardo da Vincis Vitruvian Man. Everybody knows Leonardos 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 wasnt 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 hadnt 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 wasnt 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. Leonardos solution was to de-center the circle and the squareor 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 Leonardos 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 correctionsnone 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 Leonardos 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 Andreas Vitruviusa direct reference, Sgarbi believes, to the Ferrara manuscript. Everything started to fit perfectly, like in a puzzle, he told me. Sgarbis hunch is that Leonardo and Giacomo Andrea collaborated on their drawings, but few traces of Giacomo Andrea survive, and unearthing more, enough to make Sgarbis case definitively, may take years. Still, scholars already find it intriguing. The French historian Pierre Gros, one of the worlds 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 wasnt 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 historyas was his Vitruvian Man.

Toby Lesters new book, Da Vincis Ghost, is about the history behind Leonardos Vitruvian Man. You can read more of his work at tobylester.com. Bibliography
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Other-Vitruvian-Man.html#ixzz1l4lZclze

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