Weekend Story – Leonardo da Vinci’s "Vitruvian Man" (c. 1490)

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Vitruvian Man - Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1490) 

Wonder if there ever has been a drawing, sketch or painting that has held your interest over several decades? In early 2000, for about a year a sketch sat quietly on my desktop screen. I may have looked at it several times each day, but never tiring of its presence. It was Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the famous figure with arms and legs outstretched, caught between a circle and a square. I have often wondered why it fascinated me so deeply. With these weekend articles, I tried to explore why.

At first glance, it is just a study of proportion. But the longer one looks, the more it seems to suggest something far greater. The circle - timeless, infinite, a symbol of the cosmos. The square - measured, ordered, the mark of the earthly world. And there, bridging both, stands man: fragile, vulnerable, yet perfectly aligned with the geometry of the universe.

What moves us is this paradox. The figure is bare, ordinary, not idealized like a Greek god. Yet his very form contains harmony, balance, and proportion. In our human frailty lies a quiet suggestion of the infinite. Perhaps that is what made me return to it, day after day, the thought that each one of us, in our ordinary selves, carries within us a reflection of the universe.

Da Vinci himself was living in an age when art and science walked hand in hand. The Vitruvian Man was his way of uniting measurement with imagination, geometry with grace. It is a reminder that the boundaries we build between disciplines, between reason and beauty, science and poetry, are false ones. The world is whole, and so are we.

And then there is the detail that still surprises - the two superimposed positions of arms and legs. The figure is not static. He seems to be stretching, reaching outward, expanding. It is as if Leonardo wanted to say: man is not fixed, he is possibility.

Perhaps that is why it stayed with me for so long. It became less a drawing on my screen and more a mirror, whispering that life itself is this search for balance: between the earthly square and the transcendent circle, between the limits of the body and the boundless reach of the spirit.

Looking back, I think it touched something that has always been part of my own temperament, the urge to look at art not only as beauty but as a way of asking questions about the human condition: our concerns, frailties, and compulsions, as well as the moral strands that lift the spirit. The Vitruvian Man seemed to embody all of this in a single, quiet sketch.

Even today, the Vitruvian Man feels astonishingly relevant. We live in a time of divided selves, science racing ahead, art often sidelined; technology overwhelming us, spirituality retreating to the background. Leonardo’s figure seems to step forward and remind us that wholeness lies not in choosing one over the other but in holding both together. The square and the circle, the finite and the infinite, the measurable and the immeasurable, our task is still the same: to stretch ourselves outward and find balance within the larger design.

And perhaps that is what I would like to leave you with. Sometimes, if we linger a little longer with an image, a drawing, a tune, or a fragment of poetry, it begins to reveal hidden doorways, clues to who we are and what we might yet become. The Vitruvian Man was one such doorway for me, and thanks to these inspired articles and your interest in them, I have resolved a decades-long quest to find meaning behind this drawing. Is there anything that you too feel resonates with you deeply, but you never knew why?

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