Abstract
The Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius contain pragmatic norms in the very concrete field of architecture, but history has demonstrated that human proportions have provided lasting organicity not only to the physically built result, but also to metaphysical space through the implicit symbolic meaning.
The macrocosmic infinity suggested by the circle and the mundane existence represented by the square make the two Vitruvian conditions the central symbols of ancient anthropometry preserved to this day. It is the reason why Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” has become one of the best-known symbols of Western culture. In the search for the iconic “key” of the microcosm, the minor mundus was taken up during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as a fundamental theme in more or less occult anatomical research. Architecture, medicine, astrology, theology are just a few fields that are conceptually found in the Renaissance Vitruvian hermeneutics, which led to a series of representations of the human body framed in symmetrical geometric figures. The pentagram, the circle and the square are the most frequently used and retain their symbolic validity to this day.
The present study shows the path of such figures and how they have evolved over time, sometimes departing from the rigor of the measurements made by Leonardo da Vinci for his “Vitruvian Man”. The method of comparative anthropometry highlights such an inadvertence in one of the schemes taken from Cesare Cesariano, later used by Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. The measurements recurrently indicate the bio-metric symmetry center (the navel) and the isometric symmetry center (the pubis), therefor homo ad circulum and homo ad quadratum prove to be the main Vitruvian concepts that have retained their relevance by opening up new possibilities of interpretation and symbolic rendering.