Guided Pathway

Here we witness a further interior division of the body within the geometric frames of the triangle and the pentagon inscribed inside the overall circle. But even if each of the apexes of these shapes correspond to cosmological signs (Mars over the head, Jupiter next to the left hand, Venus at the right hand, Saturn under the left foot, and Mercury under the right foot) these geometric lines appear to be generated internally by the symmetries of the body itself while the cosmological signs appear to be simply appended to the bodily limbs as accessories. Even the sun and the moon that constituted the apex and basis of Hildegard’s cosmological correspondences now touch directly on man’s navel and genitals as if these cosmic bodies too are “guided” by the instability or repose of the body’s competing centers.

This near obsession with further segmentation and geometrisation of the body—similar to the extreme proportional studies of Dürer—is manifest in the rest of Agrippa’s chapter on proportion when he proceeds to discover a great number of identifications in size or other scalar correspondences between distant parts of the body, such as the head and the hand or the head and the foot. Agrippa includes extended observations on the proportions of the human face and head, a subject that was extensively studied by Warburg in 1897 and 1898 with an eye to the application of such theories in Renaissance painting (Panofsky would eventually pick up the same subject in his own study of the history of the theories of human proportion mentioned earlier).