E10 Ideal Proportions

Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing of the human body is called “The Vitruvian Man” based on these proportions:

4 fingers make 1 palm, and 4 palms make 1 foot, 6 palms make 1 cubit; 4 cubits make a man's height.  And 4 cubits make one pace and 24 palms make a man.  The length of a man's outspread arms is equal to his height.  From the roots of his hair to the bottom of his chin is the tenth of a man's height; from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head is one eighth of his height; from the top of the breast to the roots of the hair will be the seventh part of the whole man.  From the breast to the top of the head will be the fourth part of man.  The greatest width of the shoulders contains in itself the fourth part of man.  From the elbow to the tip of the hand will be the fifth part of a man; and from the elbow to the angle of the armpit will be the eighth part of man.  The whole hand will be the tenth part of the man.  The distance from the bottom of the chin to the nose and from the roots of the hair to the eyebrows is, in each case the same, and like the ear, a third of the face.

See: http://octagonmystic.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/vitruvian-man.jpg

           

Albrecht Durer’s idea of the male and female ideal is shown in his engraving of Adam and Eve from 1528.

See: http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/d/durer/2/13/2/042.html

The Buddhists also defined ideal proportions for the body, which had to be applied to images of Buddha:

The span is the basic measure, i.e. the distance from the tip of the middle finger to the tip of the thumb of the outspread hand.  This distance corresponds to the space between the dimple in the chin and the hair-line.  Each span has twelve finger-breadths.  The whole figure measures 108 finger-breadths or 9 spans.

See: http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/history/buddhist-art/image.htm

The ideal dimensions of the ancients, used in their architecture, and used also to define the ideal human body, are based on so-called “golden ratios”.  The 13th-century scholar Leonardo Fibonacci discovered that if you start a number series with 0 and 1, then add

any two adjacent numbers to obtain the next integer, the series that results has the property such that the ratio of any two successive numbers converges on the golden number phi.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa_Golden_Ratio.jpg