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[global oneness project]
[The Golden Mean in Leonardo da Vinci's Work]
The golden mean is very mysterious in his work
because he doesn't talk about it,
[Fritjof Capra, Ph.D. - Berkeley, California - Physicist and Author]
and it is apparent in most of his paintings but not exactly.
I believe the golden section, which was also called the divine proportion,
which was something that was well known and discovered by Euclid,
the proportion that you can cut a line in such a way
that the proportion of the smaller part to the larger part
is the same as that of the larger part to the whole,
and that is called the golden section or golden mean.
And the most amazing place where it appears is in his famous Vitruvian Man,
that figure of a man in 2 positions where in one he's inscribed in the circle
and in the second one in a square.
And this is a very interesting story.
This was an illustration of a prescription for the ideal human proportions,
which was a big theme in antiquity and the Renaissance,
and this one was written down by a Roman architect, Vitruvius,
who said the ideal man is proportioned in such a way
that when he stretches out his arms, then the span of his arms is the same as his height.
So you can inscribe this in the square.
And Vitruvius also said when he spreads his arms and legs in an angle,
then you can inscribe this in a circle with the center at the navel.
And then he gave many other prescriptions that the head is a 7th of the height
and the arms are a certain proportion of the height and so on and so forth--
a long list of proportions.
So Leonardo illustrated all that.
This had been attempted before, and what artists before Leonardo have found
is when you draw a circle and a square in a concentric way
where the center is the same point--the diagonals of the square
cut at the same point as the center of the circle--
and if you do it that way, it doesn't work.
You cannot satisfy the prescriptions of Vitruvius without distorting the human body artificially.
Many artists have tried this, and you see sort of funny drawings.
So what Leonardo did was he realized that the circle and the square
cannot have the same center,
so he shifted the center.
The center of the square in Leonardo's drawing is at the *** bone,
and the center of the circle as Vitruvius described is in the navel.
And that shift of the 2 figures cuts a section in the height, which is the golden section.
So this is rather mysterious. And again, it's not exact but almost exact to an amazing degree.
I believe that this was not constructed by Leonardo,
but he had this intuition of the classical image of beauty,
the classical aesthetics of the golden mean, which was part of the way he saw things,
and so he incorporated it in his drawings and paintings.
[www.globalonenessproject.org]