A NEW DA VINCI MYSTERY

When the Italian architect Claudio Sgarbi set his ruler along a drawing of an obscure Renaissance manuscript, he was suddenly struck by what he found. He quickly compared it to a copy of the Latin author Vitruvius’ De Architectura (On Architecture), which featured a drawing of a man with arms wide apart, inscribed in a circle and a square. His navel was at the center of the circle, and his genitals were at center of the square.

“Among the several graphic interpretations of the human body’s proportions that were theorized by Vitruvius, we are aware of just one other with the same geometrical features,” Sgarbi says. “It is the one by Leonardo Da Vinci.”

For more than 30 years, Sgarbi – a historian of architecture - has studied the manuscript he discovered by chance in the Ariostea Library in Ferrara, in northern Italy. He wrote an essay on the second Vitruvian man that is set to be published, and is working on a book about its story. The American journalist Toby Lester wrote about Sgarbi’s discovery in a chapter of his book Da Vinci’s Ghost.

Leonardo’s Vitruvian man is the most famous anatomical drawing in history, in itself considered by some to be the depiction of Humanism. The man of the manuscript from Ariostea Library looks very different, and is by no means a great master’s work of art. Still, its measurements are the same.

Up until now, Leonardo was believed to be the first to have found geometrical solutions to the Latin theoretician’s indications. “At the beginning, I thought that it was a later drawing, inspired by Leonardo’s,” Sgarbi recalls. “Then, I measured the half-erased borders of a larger drawing. It was the same man, still inside a circle and a square. The final drawing had been reduced by half.”

Sgarbi explains that the erased drawing has a side of the square that measures 180 millimeters, with the circle’s radius of 108 millimeters, which are the same dimensions of the square and the circle of Leonardo’s drawing, housed today in Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia.

The main difference with Leonardo’s drawing are signs of several changes. “Above all, the erased part overlaps with the borders of the manuscript. This leads us to think that it came before Leonardo’s drawing, which is assumed to date between 1490 and 1500,” says Sgarbi. “It is hard to imagine that the author of the manuscript from Ferrara chose a piece of paper of the same size of Leonardo’s drawing. The opposite makes more sense. Indeed, Leonardo’s piece of paper is larger than usual. It looks like he wanted to make space for a drawing of an unusually large size for a manuscript.”