The Vitruvian Man sprang from the same passion. Leonardo borrowed the Roman architect Vitruvius’s belief that the parts of the human body all exist in exact proportion to one another, in order to construct a visual allegory of man’s place in the cosmos. Leonardo’s man stands at the center of not one but two geometric figures, the square and the circle. Far from trying to combine the two, in other words “squaring the circle,” Leonardo was content to show that the ratios derived from the golden section place the human being at the center of both geometric figures,
