Leonardo Da Vinci’s study and portrayal the Human Figure in Renaissance Art.

Assignment for AUD 3212: Architecture of the Early Modern World 1

Thomas Mifsud
B.Sc. Built Environment Studies
Year III 2019
 Leonardo Da Vinci’s study and portrayal the Human Figure in Renaissance Art.

Contents

I. Introduction
II. The Importance of the Human Figure in Vitruvian Studies
III. Anatomy and Artists in the Renaissance
IV. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Philosophy on the Human Figure
V. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Ideal Female Beauty.
VI. References

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 Leonardo Da Vinci’s study and portrayal the Human Figure in Renaissance Art.

Introduction

The Renaissance was a time of immense change in the social, political, economic, intellectual, and
artistic arenas of the Western world. The cultural construction of the human body occupied a pivotal
role in those transformations. The social and cultural meanings of embodiment revolutionized the
intellectual, political, and emotional ideologies of the period.

The Importance of the Human Figure in Vitruvian Studies

The intense study and the interpretation of Vitruvius by the masters of the renaissance is well known:
ever since Fra Giocondo’s first publishing of Vitruvius’ work till the culmination of the celebration
of his work in 1542, when the Vitruvian Academy was founded, Vitruvius has been a central figure
in Renaissance art and culture.

A question common to the tongues of the humanists was: what should sacred buildings be like?
Vitruvius supplied the answer. He had introduced in his third book on temples with the famous
remarks on the proportions of the human figure, which should be reflected in the proportions of the
temple. As a proof of the harmony and perfection of the human body he described how a well-built
man fits with extended hands and feet exactly into the most perfect geometrical figures, circle and
square.

This simple picture seemed to reveal a deep and fundamental truth about man and the world, and its
importance for Renaissance architects can hardly be overestimated. The image haunted their
imagination. We can find it already in Francesco di Giorgio’s codex in the Laurenziana which was
owned and annotated by Leonardo. Leonardo himself interpreted Vitruvius’ text more accurately in
his celebrated drawing at Venice, and Fra Giocondo showed the “homo ad quadratum” and “ad
circulum” on two plates of his first Vitruvius edition of 1511.

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 Leonardo Da Vinci’s study and portrayal the Human Figure in Renaissance Art.

Figure 4: Fra Giocondo's Homo ad Quadratum from Figure 3: Fra Giocondo's Homo ad Circulum from his 1511
his 1511 version of Vitruvius. version of Vitruvius

Figure 1: Vitruvian Figure from Cesariano's Figure 2: Francesco di Giorgio, Vitruvian Figure, Codex
version of Vitruvius, Como, 1521 Ashburnham 361

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 Leonardo Da Vinci’s study and portrayal the Human Figure in Renaissance Art.

Cesariano gave this conception two full page illustrations and accompanied it with a lengthy
commentary culminating in the assertion that with the Vitruvian figure one can define the proportions
which he calls “commensurare”, a common measure which implies the common measure, harmony of
everything in the world. This idea of harmony and proportion in the human figure was echoed by Luca
Pacioli, a friend of Leaonardo’s. In Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione, in which Leonardo himself drew
illustrations for, the Vitruvian concept appears again in a metaphysical concept.

Figure 5: Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Figure

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 Leonardo Da Vinci’s study and portrayal the Human Figure in Renaissance Art.

“First we shall talk of the proportions of man” – Pacioli declares in the part of architecture appended
to the De Divina Proportione, because according to him, from the human body we can derive all
measures and their denominations and in is to be found all and every ratio and proportion by which
God reveals the most innermost secrets of nature. And further, after having considered the right
arrangement of the human body, the ancients the proportioned all their work, particularly the
temples, in accordance with it. For in the human body, they found the two main figures without
which it is impossible to achieve anything, mainly the perfect circle and the square. These
observations led Pacioli on to a long winded description of the Vitruvian text.

Francesco Zorzi (Giorgi), a Neo Platonic friar, who was also closely associated with architecture
takes us a step further to his work on Universal Harmony. Here we find an illustration of the
Vitruvian text – significantly only the home and curriculum – in a chapter entitled “Quad Homo
Imitatur Mundum in Figura Circulari” (Why Man in the Figure of the Circle is an Image of the
World). The cosmic menaing of the figure could not be made clearer. But the title contains only half
of the authros views. Vitruvius’ figure holds for him a dual quality: it discloses through the visible
corporial world (Homo mondus) the invisible intellectual relation between the soul and god, for God
is the intelligibilis sphera. The author interprets the figure derived from Vitruvius in the light of the
mystic geometry of neo Platonism which had reached him through Ficino from Plotinus. 1, 2

With the renaissance revival of the Greek mathematical interpretation of God and the world, ad
invigorated by the Christian belief that man as the image of God embodied the harmonies of the
universe, the Vitruvian figure inscribed in a square and a circle became a symbol of the mathematical
sympathy between microcosm and macrocosm3.

“How could the relation between Man and God be better expressed than by building the house of God in
accordance with the fundamental geometry of square and circle?”
- Rudolf Wittkower, 1949

1
Marsilio Ficino was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most
influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance.
2
Plotinus was a major Greek-speaking philosopher of the ancient world. In his philosophy, described in the
Enneads, there are three principles: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. His teacher was Ammonius Saccas,
who was of the Platonic tradition.
3
Rudolf Allers, “Microcosimus” in Traditio II, 1944, shows that the microcosm conception displayed “an
unexpected vitality” and achieved a dominant position in the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance.

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Anatomy in the Renaissance

Italian Renaissance artists became anatomists by necessity, as they attempted to refine a more lifelike,
sculptural portrayal of the human figure. Indeed, until about 1500–1510, their investigations
surpassed much of the knowledge of anatomy that was taught at the universities. Opportunities for
direct anatomical dissection were very restricted during the Renaissance. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of
the Artists states that the great Florentine sculptor, painter, and printmaker Antonio Pollaiuolo (ca.
1432–1498) was the “first master to skin many human bodies in order to investigate the muscles and
understand the nude in a more modern way.” Giving credence to Vasari’s claim, Pollaiuolo’s highly
influential engraving of the Battle of Naked Men displays the figures of the nude warriors with nearly
flayed musculature, seen in fierce action poses and from various angles.

The later innovators in the field, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo (1475–1564),
who are known to have undertaken detailed anatomical dissections at various points in their long
careers, set a new standard in their portrayals of the human figure. The patrons commissioning art
in this period also came to expect such anatomical mastery. In the words of the Florentine sculptor
Baccio Bandinelli (1493–1560), who was trying to impress a duke to hire him, and who also appears
to have run an academy for the teaching of young artists, “I will show you that I know how to dissect
the brain, and also living men, as I have dissected dead ones to learn my art”. Circumstantial evidence
suggests that a number of other artists also attempted direct dissections. Some later great masters
produced écorchés, studies of the peeled away or ripped apart forms of muscles, to explore their
potential for purely artistic expression. The majority of artists, however, limited their investigations
to the surface of the body—the appearance of its musculature, tendons, and bones as observed
through the skin—and recorded such findings in exquisitely detailed studies after the live nude
model.

To their enormous credit, Italian Renaissance artists also pioneered a consistent vocabulary of
anatomical illustration with which new discoveries could be precisely recorded. Until the 1490s, the
most authoritative anatomical treatise was still crudely illustrated. This was a compendium entitled
the Fasciculus medicinae to which the name of Johannes de Ketham is usually attached as author.
The Latin edition of “Ketham,” published in Venice in 1491, includes woodcuts in a traditional
medieval style representing a “Urine Chart” as well as the main medieval anatomical figures (the

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Figure 6: Da Vinci's Anatomy of the Shoulders and Neck

“Blood-Letting Man,” the “Zodiac Man,” the “Gravida” or pregnant woman, the “Wound Man,”
and the “Disease Man”). However, an edition of “Ketham” published in the Italian language almost
three years later incorporates a new Renaissance figural style inspired by Giovanni Bellini, Andrea
Mantegna, and Antonio Pollaiuolo.

Leonardo da Vinci, who is without doubt the most significant artist-anatomist of all time, first
undertook a series of detailed studies of the human skull in 1489, borrowing from the architect’s

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rigorous technique of representing three-dimensional forms in plan, section, elevation, and

perspectival view. He thereby invented a new vocabulary for the history of scientific illustration.
Leonardo produced his most precisely drawn dissections of the human body in 1510–11, probably
working under the direction of the young professor of anatomy, Marcantonio della Torre, from the
University of Pavia. None of Leonardo’s discoveries were published in his lifetime. However, his
methods of illustrating the dissection of muscles in layers, as well as some of his “plan, section, and
elevation” techniques, seem to have become widely disseminated, and were incorporated in the first
comprehensively illustrated Renaissance treatise, Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica,
published in Basel in 1543 (53.682). Some of Vesalius’ images of partially dissected bodies, set
dramatically in a landscape, appear to have been designed by Titian’s pupil, John of Calcar (1499–
1546/50).

Leonardo Da Vinci and the Human Figure

Leonardo’s fascination with anatomical studies reveals a prevailing artistic interest of the time. In his
own treatise Della pittura (1435; “On Painting”), theorist Leon Battista Alberti urged painters to
construct the human figure as it exists in nature, supported by the skeleton and musculature, and
only then clothed in skin. Although the date of Leonardo’s initial involvement with anatomical study
is not known, it is sound to speculate that his anatomical interest was sparked during his
apprenticeship in Verrocchio’s workshop, either in response to his master’s interest or to that of
Verrocchio’s neighbor Pollaiuolo, who was renowned for his fascination with the workings of the
human body. It cannot be determined exactly when Leonardo began to perform dissections, but it
might have been several years after he first moved to Milan, at the time a centre of medical
investigation. His study of anatomy, originally pursued for his training as an artist, had grown by the
1490s into an independent area of research. As his sharp eye uncovered the structure of the human
body, Leonardo became fascinated by the figura istrumentale dell’ omo (“man’s instrumental figure”),
and he sought to comprehend its physical working as a creation of nature. Over the following two
decades, he did practical work in anatomy on the dissection table in Milan, then at hospitals in
Florence and Rome, and in Pavia, where he collaborated with the physician-anatomist Marcantonio
della Torre. By his own count Leonardo dissected 30 corpses in his lifetime.

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Leonardo’s early anatomical studies dealt chiefly with the skeleton and muscles; yet even at the outset,
Leonardo combined anatomical with physiological research. From observing the static structure of
the body, Leonardo proceeded to study the role of individual parts of the body in mechanical activity.
This led him finally to the study of the internal organs; among them he probed most deeply into the
brain, heart, and lungs as the “motors” of the senses and of life. His findings from these studies were
recorded in the famous anatomical drawings, which are among the most significant achievements
of Renaissance science.

The drawings are based on a connection between natural and abstract representation; he represented
parts of the body in transparent layers that afford an “insight” into the organ by using sections
in perspective, reproducing muscles as “strings,” indicating hidden parts by dotted lines, and devising
a hatching system. The genuine value of these dimostrazione lay in their ability to synthesize a
multiplicity of individual experiences at the dissecting table and make the data immediately and
accurately visible; as Leonardo proudly emphasized, these drawings were superior to descriptive
words. The wealth of Leonardo’s anatomical studies that have survived forged the basic principles of
modern scientific illustration. It is worth noting, however, that during his lifetime, Leonardo’s
medical investigations remained private. He did not consider himself a professional in the field of
anatomy, and he neither taught nor published his findings.

Leonardo envisaged the great picture chart of the human body he had produced through
his anatomical drawings and Vitruvian Man as a cosmografia del minor mondo (“cosmography of the
microcosm”). He believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy, in microcosm, for the
workings of the universe. Leonardo wrote: “Man has been called by the ancients a lesser world, and indeed
the name is well applied; because, as man is composed of earth, water, air, and fire…this body of the earth is
similar.” He compared the human skeleton to rocks (“supports of the earth”) and the expansion of
the lungs in breathing to the ebb and flow of the oceans.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Ideal Female Beauty

We must remember that before da Vinci, the artists of the Renaissance had painted portraits deeply
dominated by men, trapping women in the superficiality of external beauty. Da Vinci’s female
representation instead was the first one to study personality, character, and individuality of women,
demonstrating how they were not just symbols of beauty, but also human beings. Hence, it is not the
beauty that interests Leonardo, but the moti della mente. His innovative and poetic technique that

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introduces this complex female representation which focuses on the expression of the face, the
intensity of the look and the body language, is explained in his Treatise on Painting, where da Vinci
gives specific guidelines on how to portray the female figure:

“Women are to be represented in modest and reserved attitudes, with their knees rather close, their arms
drawing near each other, or folded about the body; their heads looking downwards, and leaning a little on
one side. To fully grasp the beauty of their face, you must not mark any muscles with a hardness of line, but
let the soft light glide upon them, and terminate imperceptibly in delightful shadows: from this will arise
grace and beauty to the face. Leave off affected curls and hairstyles or you will end up like those who have
always as their adviser the mirror and the comb, while the wind, as it tosses and tangles their smartly dressed
hair, is their greatest enemy. Depict hair which an imaginary wind causes to play about youthful faces, and
adorn heads you paint with curling locks of various kinds.”

The first Leonardo’s female portrait, painted in Milan around 1479, presents fifteen-year-old Cecilia
Gallerani, best known as the Lady with an Ermine. She was Ludovico Sforza’s lover and, according
to art critics, the animal was an emblem of docility and kindness. Here it acquires a symbolic value,
representing the qualities of a cultured woman who with her enormous passion for music and
literature had a great influence on the culture of the time. Whereas the gesture of control that the
young woman has over the long and serpentine body of the animal, suggests her dominance over
Ludovico. Meanwhile the look of her eyes, with a slightly oblique vision, fascinates the observer and
definitely explains why Sforza was not the only one to be attracted to her.

The Mona Lisa bears a strong resemblance to many Renaissance depictions of the Virgin Mary, who
was at that time seen as an ideal for womanhood. The woman sits markedly upright in a "pozzetto"
armchair with her arms folded, a sign of her reserved posture. Her gaze is fixed on the observer. The
woman appears alive to an unusual extent, which Leonardo achieved by his method of not drawing
outlines (sfumato). The soft blending creates an ambiguous mood "mainly in two features: the corners
of the mouth, and the corners of the eyes"

The painting was one of the first portraits to depict the sitter in front of an imaginary landscape, and
Leonardo was one of the first painters to use aerial perspective. The enigmatic woman is portrayed
seated in what appears to be an open loggia with dark pillar bases on either side. Behind her, a vast
landscape recedes to icy mountains. Winding paths and a distant bridge give only the slightest
indications of human presence. Leonardo has chosen to place the horizon line not at the neck, as he

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did with Ginevra de' Benci, but on a level with the eyes, thus linking the figure with the landscape
and emphasizing the mysterious nature of the painting

Leonardo did not only paint portraits of strong women, he also gave form and brought to life the
concept of ‘the erotic woman’ and Leda and the Swan is one of the most provocative nudes ever
painted by him. In this scene, Leonardo represents a nude, which suggests to the human mind the
idea of an “available” and provocative body.

The artist’s vision of women verged on the limits of blasphemy for many of his contemporaries. Yet,
it allowed him to create masterpieces and change the way the female was represented at the time. He
showed women as enigmatic, inaccessible, sweet, sensual, elusive, ambiguous or ironic, but most
importantly, he showed them with a soul and character, always revealing to a great extent
psychological introspection.

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Figure 7: Lady with an Ermine, Leonardo Da Vinci 1489-1490

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