Body Manifold: Mathematics (mis)performed by Vitruvian and Acephalic bodies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹Some of the artists that attempted to render Vitruvius' description in graphic manner include: Cesare Caesariano (1521), Albrecht Dürer (1528), Pietro di Giacomo Cataneo (1554), Heinrich Lautensack (1618), William Blake (1795), and Susan Dorothea White, whose version Sex Change for Vitruvian Man (2005) raised questions regarding the gender specifi c nature of existing studies on human proportion and bodily geometry in Western art.

²Deleuze and Guattari further explain that ‘Royal, or State science only tolerates and appropriates stone cutting by means of templates … under conditions that restore the primacy of the fixed model of form, mathematical figures, and measurement’ (2004: 402). This explanation seems fitting as a description of the geometry of the Vitruvian Man, and its conception within a condition of possibility defined by the royal or theological nature of classical logic.