Davinci Drawing a Perfect Circle
Vitruvian Man Had a Hernia
The beautifully proportioned cartoon illustrates our place in the universe improve than Leonardo da Vinci ever knew.
Leonardo da Vinci/Accademia of Venice
Around the year 1487, Leonardo da Vinci sketched what would become ane of the about famous illustrations in the world. In information technology, a perfectly drawn circle sits atop a square. Perfectly framed within those shapes, with arms and legs outstretched in two unlike orientations, is a curly-haired, slightly frowning, and very naked man now commonly known as "Vitruvian Man."
Perchance no piece of art illustrates the beauty of the human body better than Vitruvian Man. Leonardo obsessed over the perfect proportionality of the human trunk. He pored over the calculations of the Roman architect Vitruvius, who had labored in the 1st century B.C. to draw the beauty of human proportions. In Book 3 of his treatise De Architectura, Vitruvius wrote:
For if a man exist placed flat on his back, with his easily and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his belly button, the fingers and toes of his two hands and anxiety will affect the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so besides a square figure may exist plant from it.
Depicting the human course in this way expressed Leonardo'southward belief that humankind represented a microcosm of the universe. Fitting within a circle, humans were a reflection of the celestial. Fitting inside a square, humans were as well a reflection of the Globe. By inhabiting both shapes, symbolizing dissimilar aspects of the universe, humans could span the gap between the terrestrial and the divine. Every bit Leonardo wrote in a notebook entry dated to effectually 1492:
Past the ancients man has been called the world in miniature; and certainly this name is well bestowed, because, inasmuch equally homo is composed of earth, water, air and burn down, his body resembles that of the earth.
Only at that place's a bump in the story. In 2011, Hutan Ashrafian, a lecturer of surgery at Imperial Higher London, noticed an odd thing virtually Vitruvian Man. You can be forgiven for not gazing much at Vitruvian Man's parcel. Merely non anybody has been so minor, and while looking at Leonardo'southward analogy, Ashrafian noticed an odd bulge about Vitruvian Human's burl. This protuberance, slightly above the left side of his groin, looks exactly like a medical problem that plagues most 30 percent of men and 3 percent of women in their lifetimes: an inguinal hernia.
Throughout history, anatomical illustrations have been fabricated using the recently deceased as models, and many of Leonardo's sketches were no exception. Ashrafian says that the man who served as Leonardo'southward model for his illustration of human being perfection probably had a hernia. If the model was a corpse, the hernia may accept been what killed him. If he was a live model, he may ultimately have died from its complications. Other experts agree with Ashrafian, including Jeffrey Young, managing director at the Academy of Virginia'due south Trauma Center, and Michael Rosen, director of the Comprehensive Hernia Center at Academy Hospitals Case Medical Heart. "If information technology isn't a hernia," says Rosen, "then I really have no idea what it would be."
The possibility that Vitruvian Homo had a hernia is just that, a possibility. "The cool affair with art is it is all in the eye of the beholder," says Peter Hallowell, director of bariatric surgery at the University of Virginia. If yous squint, tilt your head, and await closely at his groin, you lot might be able to meet what the fuss is about. But if you lot'll indulge me, the significance of Vitruvian Man now becomes all the more profound. It illustrates not just Renaissance ideas of our place in the universe, but it besides takes us down a labyrinthine path deep into humans' evolutionary history.
Vitruvian Man c. 1492.
Leonardo da Vinci/Accademia of Venice
Humans, along with killer whales, deer, and pangolins, are mammals. Our fuzzy, milk-producing lineage evolved about 225 1000000 years ago from reptilian ancestors. For reasons that remain obscure, male mammals usually have their homo-parts swinging out in the cakewalk instead of snuggled comfortably within their bodies.
Every bit a male person mammalian fetus develops, his testicles starting time near the kidneys, and over the course of several weeks have a meandering trip through the inguinal canals before finally being pushed through the abdominal wall to their final resting spot in the scrotum. Females' reproductive organ development is slightly less complicated, simply also involves a passage through the inguinal canals.
Considering this procedure compromises our lower abdominal tissue, our intestines have merely a flimsy tissue layer supporting them inside of our body cavity. This isn't much of a problem for well-nigh mammals considering they get effectually on four legs, with their bodies positioned in such a mode that the stomach muscles support the weight of the intestines.
Just in the human lineage, which has been walking upright for a petty longer than 4 million years, the weak layers of lower abdominal wall tissue must bear the brunt of our abdominal weight. When a bit of intestine bulges through a thin layer of lower abdominal tissue, a hernia is born.
Humans have mused nearly the origins and relationships of living creatures for millennia. But it wasn't until Charles Darwin that we figured out how development produces structures as elegant every bit the center, as baroque as the proboscis of a butterfly. Natural selection, oftentimes described tautologically as "the survival of the fittest," is the process that allows a new mutation—say the ability to digest lactose in dairy products—to persist and spread through members of a species across generations.
Development past natural selection is an unconscious process, simply it is often described metaphorically as being like a tinkerer, messily working away with odds and ends that are already lying effectually, with no grand programme in sight. Because natural selection can only work with what already exists, development tin can't simply take apart faulty structures and rebuild them from the ground upwardly. Information technology is stuck with what's around and must make the all-time of it.
This means many of the traits found in our bodies are effectively jury-rigged. These imperfect traits work well enough nearly of the fourth dimension, but when we look closely we can see chinks in our armor. Example in point: Natural selection has tinkered with the iv-legged mammalian body plan to make the human 2-legged program. Information technology lets us tap dance and high v, but hernias are just one of many problems that arose as a byproduct when we began walking upright.
Total-time two-legged walking demanded skeletal changes from head to toe. The spine of our four-legged mammalian cousins forms an arch. Our spines serve equally weight-bearing structures for our entire body, and they have adopted some wavy Southward-shapes to do so. Our feet developed an arch. Our pelvis widened and flattened into a saddle shape.
All of the evolutionary changes to our skeletal structure put pressure on the delicate joints of our lower spine, our pelvises, and our anxiety, causing frustrating wellness bug similar pinched nerves, fallen arches, and the back and neck pain that plague so many of us. Changes to the shape of our pelvises besides explain why childbirth is such a unsafe effort for women, oftentimes requiring a phalanx of helpers.
And these are just issues that arose when we began walking on two legs. If we explore other adaptations from our evolutionary past, we can find explanations for why laughing while eating is a dangerous pastime, why we should all suffer from octopus eyeball envy, and why yous might react merely fine to claret thinners while I react adversely.
Leonardo da Vinci created a piece of art more elegant and profound than he knew when he sketched the Vitruvian Human being. In the one-half-millennium since his expiry, we have learned that humans (and all living creatures) do indeed bridge the gap between the terrestrial and the celestial. Virtually of the buzzing atoms that brand upwardly our bodies have called our planet habitation since our solar system formed in a bully swirling gaseous mass more than 4.5 billion years ago. These atoms have even loftier origins, born in the fierce deaths of the universe's early on stars.
But in selecting his model for homo perfection, Leonardo also managed to depict how our perfect bodies, upon closer inspection, are never so perfect after all. His sketch likewise reminds u.s. that there is a certain futility in humans' celebrated search for an exemplar, the 1 private we can all point to and telephone call the acme of the human class. Unlike Leonardo'southward neo-Ideal ideals, at that place are no archetypes in biology, beyond those nosotros agree in our own minds.
Vitruvian Man simultaneously displays the elegance of our body and the deep-seated imperfections and quondam-fashioned workarounds that we inherited from our ancestors over the grade of 3.8 billion years of life on Earth. Through him, we tin tell parallel stories: the story of the evolution of our bodies, and that of the evolution of our understanding of the universe.
He allows the states to marvel at how the universe and its natural laws, working through such an imperfect, iterative process as evolution, could produce an organism every bit curious, intelligent, and self-reflective equally Homo sapiens. A hairy, awkward, sometimes violent, sometimes peaceful creature who can gaze up at the sky and ask: Who am I, and why am I here?
Source: https://slate.com/technology/2014/02/vitruvian-mans-hernia-leonardo-da-vinci-drawing-shows-flaws-of-human-evolution.html
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