In honor of the quincentennial of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, there will be numerous exhibitions of the master’s work. His Vitruvian Man drawing in particular was subject to a lawsuit to prevent it from hanging in the great show in the Louvre opening this month was recently rejected. The grounds for the lawsuit were the fragility of the work, along with some snarkiness about France trying to “culturally appropriate” Leonardo from Italy. Does this kind of petty fighting ever end, or is it part of what it means to be human?
Vitruvian Man is famously a diagram of the proportions of the human body. I’ve wondered for a long time whether women have proportions too; hence my not-so-humble multiple exposure attempt at a “Vitruvian Woman”.
This image was originally blogged on March 18, 2018.
Heather Williams
9 Oct 2024Hello and why not? As the other half of the human species, I’d want to understand why, with all of Da Vinci’s attention to detail, that he would not include a female form of the Vitruvian Man? Was his work destroyed? I’m amazed that ‘The Last Supper’ remains, but perhaps its significance was lost.