Engineers Black Book

The Virtuvian Man

Engineers Black Book

The idea for the cover design of the ‘Engineers Black Book’ came to the author from a sketch of the ‘Vitruvian Man’ by the great Italian artist, inventor and mathematician, Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo drew his inspiration from the works of Vitruvius entitled ‘De Architectura’

Marcus Vitruvius was a Roman architect who in the first century BC, authored a series of 10 books, each dealing with aspects of architecture, city planning & machines.

In his works, Vitruvius emphasises that ‘building’ should be based on the proportions of man, as he considered the human body to be the model of perfection. This is borne out by his emphasis on the rationalisation of geometry by means of small whole numbers joined together to arrive at the final construction.

He further justifies this by stating that the human body with arms and legs outstretched, fits into perfect geometric forms, i.e. the circle, the square and the triangle.Among other things, he notes that:

• The outstretched length of a man’s hands equals his height.
• The face from the chin to the top of the forehead equals 10%  of his height.
• The palm of the hand from the wrist to the top of the middle finger also equals 10% of his height.
• The maximum width of a man’s shoulders equals 25% of his height.

In this manner, Vitruvius delineates the proportions of the male human body that Leonardo da Vinci later so faithfully and accurately reproduced in his now famous sketch
‘The Vitruvian Man’.

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