ABSTRACT
In the 1480s, Leonardo da Vinci drew the so-called Vitruvian Man, based on a description in the architectural treatise De architectura by the first century-B.C. Leonardo combined Marcus Vitruvius Pollio's two images by doubling the arms and legs so that they reach both the circumference of a circle and the sides of a square; the navel falls at the center of the circle but not of the square. In this drawing, Leonardo reflects both the enthusiasm for Vitruvius among Italian Renaissance architects and the notion that the ideal measure of man is governed by regular geometric shapes. One of the artists most involved with Lorenzo de' Medici's humanist Neoplatonic circle was Sandro Botticelli, the son of a tanner and a Florentine by birth. Leonardo completed a relatively small number of paintings but left thousands of drawings and pages of notes, which he bequeathed to his pupil Francesco Melzi.
