The MAN continues calendar of public meetings dedicated to the world of publishing.

After the opening of a space intended for consultation of the museum’s library, which can welcome users every day into the idea of ​​a museum to experience, where to read or even work, the cycle of appointments on the agenda continues until the end of October.

Thursday 20 October at 6.30pm

The deception of the Vitruvian man. The divine proportion algorithm, Giunti, 2021.

The author Roberto Concas talks with Elisabetta Masala

A long study of over thirty years, conducted by the art historian Roberto Concas, started on the compositional metric of the Sardinian-Catalan pictorial altarpieces, by pure chance, led to an unexpected result and with the implications of inevitable “uproar”.

Among the hundreds of verified works, even by very great artists, is the famous drawing of the Vitruvian Man which, examined with meticulous attention, reveals the enigmas of a possible “deception” hatched by Leonardo da Vinci and remained hidden from everyone for five centuries . On the Vitruvian man we demonstrate, among much else, the presence of two figures, the singularity of the double legs and arms, the different dimensions between the right and left side of the body, the irregular square and circle.

With Leonardo’s drawing, suddenly and unexpectedly, the research moves into an intricate “overall system”, hinged on arithmetic and geometric formulas, organized on the grounds of a “finalistic order” offering a possible interpretative light on the “Divine Proportion” , indicated by the mathematical friar Luca Pacioli as a “very secret science” and “one thing with the Holy Trinity”.

No plot, not even of a historical thriller, could have included so many relationships, following the thread of the solution woven by Leonardo da Vinci.

As very rarely happens in art, the evidence for this research is also of a mathematical nature, with the identification of an algorithm, understood as a simple sequence of arithmetic operations, applied in all Western works of art, ranging in age from the 4th and 18th centuries.

Leonardo, having concluded his collaboration with Luca Pacioli, perhaps fearing the disappearance of the very ancient and very secret rules of the Divine Proportion, felt he had to hand them down to posterity, but in an encrypted form, not being able to tell them clearly, because the Church itself and all the congregations of arts and crafts, they certainly would not have forgiven him!

Hence the “deception” of Leonardo who intervenes in “common thinking” finding applause and amazement for his Vitruvian man, universally considered as a “treatise” on the ideal proportions of the human figure, in homage to the thought of one of the greatest theorists of architecture, the Roman architect Marco Vitruvius Pollio.

It is man, the object of animated Renaissance theoretical discussions, for which Leonardo, Luca Pacioli, Piero della Francesca and Francesco di Giorgio Martini seek conceptual synthesis in the anthropomorphic and anthropocentric vision, in an attempt to reconcile the ideas of antiquity – from Plato to Vitruvius – with the Renaissance relevance of Christocentrism.

Leonardo intervenes in this debate, where Vitruvius was taken as a symbol and absolute reference, making everyone believe they were magnifying him, instead developing a condition of semantic perception, which became and remained for 520 years as: an insurmountable threshold of satisfaction with knowledge.

The illustration was so clear and convincing that no one ever thought of anything else! This unprecedented discovery is presented in its first mathematically demonstrative part, leaving to a second part the extremely delicate aspect linked to the representation of the Trinitarian dogma as the central mystery of the Christian faith.

Free entry while places last.

Upcoming events

Thursday 27 October at 6.30pm

Monte Verità. Back to Nature edited by Nicoletta Mongini

Chiara Gatti and Sergio Risaliti, Lindau, 2022.

History of the hill of utopia, between art, landscape and spirituality.

As part of the twinning signed between MAN and Monte Verità

for residences of Sardinian artists outside Moenia.