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| Vitruvian Man |
Kenneth Clark, who remains the best commentator on Leonardo, wrote years
ago that Leonardo’s great artistic gift was for making emblematic
images from observed life, hieroglyphic symbols that have the haunting
quality of the real, constantly renegotiating the line “between science
and symbolism.” Leonardo’s most “documentary” drawings, like the famous
cross-section of the child wrapped in its mother’s womb, are largely
imaginary: he never dissected a pregnant woman, and, anyway, the uterus
he drew showed the multiple placenta of a cow. When he turned his mind
fully to an image, it nearly always was both mythic and momentary. The
“Mona Lisa,” of course, is the most famous of these double images,
ageless femme fatale and Florentine merchant’s wife. But the gift,
uncannily, is visible in everything he does.
The famous figure of Vitruvian man, for instance, splayed out in his encircled square, is in origin a derivative illustration of an antique idea about regular proportions: a man’s proportions when the arms are horizontal make a square; with the arms diagonal they center a circle. Though it is possible to see this as a “humanist” ideal, it is not necessarily so; it says not that man’s proportions are divine but merely that they are regular. The point of the image is not that man is the measure of all things; it is that man can, like all things, be measured. But the tension between this abstract and diminishing idea and its realization as a strange, aged, specific figure, with a strong, unostentatious but perfect body and a grave, unforgettable face—half Don Imus, half St. Jerome; Nicholl suggests that it is a self-portrait—gives the image a certain heroism, as though the individual had stoically lent himself for a scientific trial.
