About Vitruvian Man

Vitruvian Man is over five hundred years old (created ~1492). What on earth makes it relevant to the work of a 21st-century geographer? Well, for starters, it was created by Leonardo da Vinci, whose passion for both art and science/ technology is famous. This is why I was drawn to geography, a truly cross-disciplinary discipline, where the arts and the sciences are both welcome. But Vitruvian Man represents the next step: the creative engagement of the sciences and the humanities. One interesting theory is that Vitruvian Man was da Vinci's artful, anatomically-oriented solution to the classic geometric problem of squaring the circle; a fuller account is given here.

So, da Vinci's work resulted from the creative interplay between his steadfast devotion to empirical observation, which many people consider a key feature of the sciences, and his ability to fathom and express the human condition, a key feature of the humanities. Why should we expect anything less of contemporary scholars? After all, we've had over 500 years to improve on Leonardo. Have we? Maybe geographers can play a special role in fostering this sort of creative interplay; see UCSB's New Visions of Nature, Science, and Religion program as an example.

A final word: putting da Vinci on my home page is not meant to imply Renaissance-manness by association! My own case as a scholar may be better implied by the Dilbert cartoon below.