Guided Pathway

At the close of his lecture, Saxl juxtaposes Leonardo’s Vitruvian drawing to Albrecht Dürer’s Melencholia I in order to illustrate the differences between Northern and Southern European mentalities.  For Dürer, Saxl writes, the Saturnian “Melancholy is a symbol of the individual mind looking for its own image in the mirror of the universe,” while for Leonardo the Vitruvian figure serves as a model of “the mind” that “acquiesces” in the world of external objects by recognizing “its own principle of inherent regularity” (Saxl, vol. 1, pp. 69-70). In other words, Dürer is inclined towards self-reflective allegory, while Leonardo reaffirms the body as a symbol with a quantifiable presence within the realm of science and the natural world.

But in Panel B, the Vitruvian figure is instead juxtaposed not to Melancholia, but to a 1513 drawing of the ‘ideal proportions of the human body according to Dürer by Hans von Kulmbach, #8. Here man is not inscribed inside a singular external circle but is segmented by a number of concentric circles that portray analogies and correspondences within the body itself. It is as if the outer world has been consolidated inside the bodily world of man, which in itself is a universe of microcosmic relations. In his seminal 1921 study on the history of the theory of human proportions, Panofsky argued that it is in Dürer’s studies of proportion that “the actual transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance can be observed, as under laboratory conditions” (Panofsky, “The History of the Theory of Human Proportions,” 130).