Guided Pathway

Vitruvian men

For Saxl, the Renaissance took a step backwards in order to move ahead: it regressed into ancient cosmological interpretation to discover a rational cosmic order, one that granted central place to the human individual and led to the creation of the modern subject (which truly emerges a century later in the philosophy of Descartes). “Dürer and Leonardo point the way in which men were to find release from the belief in cosmic servitude” (Saxl, vol. 1, p. 69). Man is no longer the subject of cosmic forces but actively intervenes in them and so does the image of microcosm and macrocosm acquire a new meaning: “Instead of regarding himself as a likeness of the cosmos and in the bonds of its rays, man now confronts it as a person.”

One can trace this epistemological transition in Leonardo’s well-known drawing of the Vitruvian man, #7, captioned simply as “Proportional Figure.” Saxl suggests that Leonardo “must have known the doctrine of the first man” because the Renaissance artist writes that “[m]an is called by the ancients a world in miniature, and certainly this name is well applied.” Yet such a statement no longer reflects the influence of “cosmological speculation,” as in the hermetically informed writings of Hildegard, but rather demonstrates the presence of Vitruvius, who by that time was recognized as having produced “the main textbook of Renaissance aesthetics.” Leonardo’s project is both anthropocentric and anthropometric; it is based on measurement and numerical proportion instead of abstract Medieval influences. For that reason, Saxl does not consider Leonardo’s figure as a proper ‘microcosmic figure,’ but instead a study in proportion, trying to validate numerical laws of proportion based on the Vitruvian tradition as it was gradually infiltrated by a combination of empirical observation and scientific reasoning.