Close Enough for Vitruvian Man

On hot summer days when I was a kid I would lie in the grass in the upper meadow at my grandparents’ farm. I stretched out my arms like that guy in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing. I kept my pants on, though. I stayed as still as I could, pretending to be dead meat. I hoped to entice soaring Turkey vultures to land this close to me. They were never fooled.

Vitruvian Man (via Wikipedia):

The Vitruvian Man (Italian: L’uomo vitruviano; [ˈlwɔːmo vitruˈvjaːno]) is a drawing by the Italian Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci, dated to c. 1490. Inspired by the writings of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, the drawing depicts a nude man in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart and inscribed in both a circle and square. Described by the art historian Carmen C. Bambach as “justly ranked among the all-time iconic images of Western civilization,”^[1] the work is a unique synthesis of artistic and scientific ideals and often considered an archetypal representation of the High Renaissance.

The drawing represents Leonardo’s conception of ideal body proportions, originally derived from Vitruvius but influenced by his own measurements, the drawings of his contemporaries, and the De pictura treatise by Leon Battista Alberti. Leonardo produced the Vitruvian Man in Milan and the work was probably passed to his student Francesco Melzi. It later came into the possession of Venanzio de Pagave, who convinced the engraver Carlo Giuseppe Gerli to include it in a book of Leonardo’s drawings, which widely disseminated the previously little-known image. It was later owned by Giuseppe Bossi, who wrote early scholarship on it, and eventually sold to the Gallerie dell’Accademia in 1822, where it has remained since. Due to its sensitivity to light, the drawing rarely goes on public display, but it was borrowed by the Louvre in 2019 for their exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death.