Leonardo, Vitruvius and 6,068 measured bodies

The Seventh Part of the Man

Around his drawing in the circle and the square, Leonardo wrote out the proportions of a man: Vitruvius's first, then a list of his own that repeats some of them, adds others and changes a few, among them the foot, which becomes a seventh of the height instead of a sixth. The Artificial Wasteland held every line a tape measure can test against the 4,082 men and 1,986 women of the US Army's 2012 anthropometric survey. His rule for the knee holds for all but 39 of them, the forearm in Richter's 1883 translation fits none of them, and on the foot, among the men, Vitruvius and Leonardo finish 2,039 to 2,043.

Subject 14380, a man 1,772 mm tall whose arms span 1,772 mm, drawn in Leonardo's two poses from his own measurements. He is one of 5 people in the survey, all of them men, who keep all six of Vitruvius's lines that a tape can test, with the breadth of the breast taken across the shoulders.

  • Leonardo's square: as wide as tall
  • this body's own: as wide as its arms reach, and the circle its fingertips and feet touch
  • the navel, where Leonardo puts the centre
  • where the centre falls

Every body is drawn at the same height, so only proportions differ. How the outline is made is in the notes at the foot of the page.

The sheet

The drawing is in Venice, catalogue number 228 of the Gallerie dell'Accademia, which describes it as metalpoint, pen and ink, with touches of watercolour, on white paper, and places it, probably, in Leonardo's years in Milan. Leonardo wrote above and below it, in mirror writing, right to left. The text opens with Vitruvius, the Roman architect whose treatise on architecture sets out, in its third book, the proportions of a well shaped man. Leonardo's summary of him begins: 4 fingers make 1 palm, and 4 palms make 1 foot, 6 palms make 1 cubit; 4 cubits make a man's height. By that count the foot, four palms of the twenty-four that make a man, is a sixth of the height, and the cubit, elbow to fingertip, is a quarter. Vitruvius says both in so many words.

Then Leonardo gives a list of his own. Some of it repeats Vitruvius, some is new, and some changes him: the sixth that Vitruvius measures from the top of the breast to the roots of the hair, Leonardo measures to the crown, and the foot gets a new number: The foot is the seventh part of the man. The museum that keeps the sheet says that the measures and proportions of the drawing non riflettono il testo vitruviano (do not reflect Vitruvius's text, though the writing cites it) and follow the ones Leon Battista Alberti analysed in his treatise on sculpture, De statua. Alberti's way of getting them was a survey of a kind. He chose bodies that experts held to be the most beautiful, measured them, and, spretis extremorum excessibus, throwing out the extremes, kept the middle values, in units of a six-hundredth of the height. His table puts the foot, from the big toe to the heel, at 100 of the 600: a sixth, as Vitruvius had it. The seventh is Leonardo's own, and Fabrizio Apollonio and Marco Gaiani, writing in 2023, call it his most important revision of both, perhaps an unintended one. Leonardo measured living men too: on a sheet at Windsor, which the Royal Collection dates to about 1490, he began to measure a model, whom the sheet names.

A tape measure can settle what a quotation cannot. Between October 2010 and April 2012 the US Army measured 11,961 soldiers, and in 2017 it released two samples, 4,082 men and 1,986 women, drawn to match the make-up of the whole Army, with 93 measurements on each, for anyone to use. They are soldiers, not humanity, and the notes at the foot of the page say what that means. Below is every line of Leonardo's text, in J. P. Richter's translation of 1883, with what those 6,068 bodies say about it.

Leonardo wrote his proportions as whole parts of the man (the fourth part, the seventh part), so each line is judged the way he would have written it: for each body, which whole part is the measurement nearest to? Nearest, that is, on the one scale that does not care which way round you divide; why that matters is the story of the foot, further down. Men and women are counted separately, because the survey released them as separate samples and warns against pooling them.

  1. 4 fingers make 1 palm, and 4 palms make 1 foot, 6 palms make 1 cubit; 4 cubits make a man's height. And 4 cubits make one pace and 24 palms make a man

    4 diti fā · uno palmo · e 4 palmi · fā · uno pie ·, 6 palmi fā un cubito · 4 cubiti · fā · uno uomo · e 4 · cubiti fā uno · passo · e 24 palmi · fā uno uomo

    Foot: half the menCubit: holds

    This is Vitruvius, as Leonardo copies him. The foot, four palms of twenty-four, is the sixth part: nearest the sixth for 2,039 of the 4,082 men and 565 of the 1,986 women. The cubit, six palms of twenty-four, is the fourth part: nearest the fourth for 3,897 men (95.5%) and 1,916 women (96.5%). Both are drawn out further down.

  2. If you open your legs so much as to decrease your height 1/14 and spread and raise your arms till your middle fingers touch the level of the top of your head you must know that the centre of the outspread limbs will be in the navel and the space between the legs will be an equilateral triangle.

    Holds, as near as a stick figure can say

    Built from each body's own measurements, the legs open to 61.3° for the median man and 60.8° for the median woman, against the equilateral triangle's 60°, and the centre of the circle through fingertips and feet falls within a couple of centimetres of the navel. The circle, below.

  3. The length of a man's outspread arms is equal to his height.

    Tanto apre l'omo nelle braccia · quāto · è la · sua · altezza.

    648 of 6,068

    Equal to within the 1 cm the survey allowed its own measurers for span: 351 men (8.6%) and 297 women (15.0%). Most reach wider than they are tall. The square, below.

  4. From the roots of the hair to the bottom of the chin is the tenth of a man's height; from the bottom of the chin to the top of his head is one eighth of his height

    Not measured

    The survey has no landmark at the hairline and took no height of the chin above the floor, so neither line can be tested here.

  5. from the top of the breast to the top of his head will be one sixth of a man.

    dal di sopra · del petto · alla · som̄ità · del capo · fia il · sexto dell'omo

    3,300 of 6,068

    Vitruvius gives his sixth from the top of the breast to the roots of the hair; Leonardo moves it up to the crown, where Alberti's table has it (the hollow of the throat at 500 of 600). Nearest the sixth for 2,409 men (59.0%) and 891 women (44.9%); the rest are nearest the fifth. The median man is 5.52 of these tall, the median woman 5.45.

    The 6,068, drawn

    Tape: stature less the height of the suprasternale, the notch at the top of the breastbone.

  6. From the top of the breast to the roots of the hair will be the seventh part of the whole man.

    Not measured

    No landmark at the hairline.

  7. From the nipples to the top of the head will be the fourth part of a man.

    dalle · tette al di sopra · del capo fia la · quarta · parte · dell'omo

    5,485 of 6,068

    Nearest the fourth for 4,038 of the 4,082 men (98.9%) and 1,447 of the 1,986 women (72.9%). The survey measured to the most forward point of the chest: its report says that for men with flatter chests that makes no practical difference from the nipple and that heavier chests give a higher mark, and the women were measured to the point of the bust.

    The 6,068, drawn

    Tape: stature less chest height (the chest point, anterior).

  8. The greatest width of the shoulders contains in itself the fourth part of the man.

    la maggiore · larghezza · delle · spalle · contiene · in se la quarta parte dell'omo

    3,418 of 6,068

    Leonardo began this line with a different number. Richter's notes record that he wrote la oct, the start of the eighth, crossed it out, and wrote la quarta. The fourth holds for 1,911 men (46.8%) and 1,507 women (75.9%); most of the other men are broad enough to be nearest a third. Nobody is nearest an eighth.

    The 6,068, drawn

    Tape: bideltoid breadth, the widest span across the shoulder muscles.

  9. From the elbow to the tip of the hand will be the fifth part of a man

    dal gomito · alla punta · della · mano · fia la · quinta · parte · dell'omo

    The fifth: nobodyThe fourth: nearly everybody

    So Richter reads it, and so does Fumagalli. The transcription English Wikipedia cites to Pedretti reads quarta, the fourth, and so, to our eye, does the facsimile Richter printed. Nobody in the survey is nearest a fifth; nearly everybody is nearest a fourth. The forearm, below.

  10. and from the elbow to the angle of the armpit will be the eighth part of the man.

    da esso · gomito · al termine della · spalla · fia la octaua parte · d'esso omo

    Depends on the translation

    Richter's angle of the armpit renders Leonardo's termine della spalla, the end of the shoulder. Measured to the armpit, with the arm hanging, the line holds for 2,628 men (64.4%) and 1,017 women (51.2%). Measured to the point of the shoulder, nobody is nearest an eighth, and 5,550 of the 6,068 are nearest a fifth.

    The 6,068, drawn (armpit reading)

    Tape: axilla height (the front fold of the armpit) less the height of the elbow, which is the shoulder-point height less the shoulder-to-elbow length, arm hanging.

  11. The whole hand will be the tenth part of the man

    tutta · la mano · fia la decima · parte · dell'omo

    Rarely: a ninth

    Vitruvius says the same. Nearest the tenth for 535 men (13.1%) and 191 women (9.6%); nearest the ninth for 3,381 men and 1,618 women. Alberti's table, which puts the wrist of a hanging hand at 300 of 600 and its middle fingertip at 230, makes the hand about a ninth too. The median man is 9.09 hands tall and the median woman 9.02.

    The 6,068, drawn

    Tape: hand length, from the bottom of the radius at the wrist to the tip of the middle finger.

  12. the beginning of the genitals marks the middle of the man.

    il menbro · virile · nascie · nel mezzo dell'omo

    Just below the middle

    The survey's crotch is defined as the level of the lower edge of the pubic bone, near where the genitals begin, though the sheet is not precise enough to say whether exactly there. Taken at the crotch, the middle of the man is 0.481 of the way up for the median man and 0.480 for the median woman, 3.3 cm below the half for both; 397 men and 203 women have it at the half or above. Alberti's table puts os, sub quo pendet penis, the bone below which the penis hangs, at 300 of 600: exactly the half. The next line, From below the knee to the beginning of the genitals will be the fourth part of the man, comes out nearest a fifth for most of them at the same landmark.

  13. From the sole of the foot to below the knee will be the fourth part of the man.

    dal di sotto · del piè · al di sotto del ginochio · fia · la quarta · parte · dell'omo

    6,029 of 6,068

    The best line on the sheet: nearest the fourth for 4,064 men (99.6%) and 1,965 women (98.9%).

    The 6,068, drawn

    Tape: tibiale height, the top of the shin bone on the inside of the knee.

  14. The distance from the bottom of the chin to the nose and from the roots of the hair to the eyebrows is, in each case the same, and like the ear, a third of the face.

    Not measured

    No landmark at the hairline or at the base of the nose.

So is anyone Leonardo's man? Of the nine lines a tape can test with the landmark they name, nobody keeps all nine as Richter reads them, because nobody keeps his forearm. Read the forearm as a quarter and 24 people keep all nine: 20 men and 4 women. Vitruvius's man is rarer. The survey can test six of his lines: the span, the foot as a sixth, the cubit as a quarter, the hand as a tenth, the middle of the breast to the crown as a quarter (a line whose first words are an editor's supplement to the manuscripts), and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth. That last one turns on where the breast is measured. Across the chest, where the survey took its chest breadth, nobody is nearest a quarter: 3,278 of the 4,082 men and 1,546 of the 1,986 women are nearest a sixth. Leonardo's list has no breadth of the breast; its quarter-wide line is the greatest width of the shoulders. Measured there, 5 people keep all six of Vitruvius's lines, all of them men. The drawing at the top begins with one of them.

Among the 4,082 men, 2,039 are nearer Vitruvius's sixth and 2,043 nearer Leonardo's seventh. The margin is four men.

How close that is depends on a choice every count like this has to make before it counts anything: halfway between a sixth and a seventh, measured how? Compare the fractions themselves, and the halfway mark is at 13/84 of the height: then Leonardo wins, 2,171 to 1,909. Count instead how many of his own feet tall each man is, and the halfway mark is six and a half: then Vitruvius wins, 2,180 to 1,888. The two questions are the same question turned over, and they disagree. The only halfway mark that gives the same answer both ways round is the geometric one, the square root of 42, or 6.4807 feet tall, and on it the vote is 2,039 to 2,043. The median man in the survey is 6.4811 of his own feet tall.

Where is halfway between a sixth and a seventh?

Halfway line at 6.4807 feet tall. Left of it, nearer Vitruvius's sixth (blue); right of it, nearer Leonardo's seventh (red). The chart shows only the people near the line.

Men

none exactly on the line

Women

none exactly on the line

The 1,986 women are not close on any scale: Leonardo's seventh, 1,421 to 565. The median woman is 6.6120 of her own feet tall. Leonardo's drawing is of a man, and among men his new foot is a coin toss.

The forearm nobody has

In Richter's edition, which is also the English text Project Gutenberg carries, Leonardo says: From the elbow to the tip of the hand will be the fifth part of a man. Nobody in the survey has that forearm. Nobody is nearest a fifth, and nobody is within 5% of one: the shortest forearm and hand for its height belongs to someone who is 4.23 of them tall, still nearer a quarter.

The fifth may not be Leonardo's. Giuseppina Fumagalli's selection of his writings, in 1915, also prints quinta, the fifth. But the transcription on English Wikipedia's page for the drawing, which it cites to Carlo Pedretti, prints quarta, the fourth: Vitruvius's cubit again, and the six palms of twenty-four that Leonardo had copied a few lines earlier. Richter printed a facsimile of the sheet in the same volume as his transcription. Here is the line, beside two others from it, all three turned round to read left to right:

Leonardo's handwriting, mirrored: mano fia la, then the word in question, then parte
The forearm: mano · fia · la ? · parte
Leonardo's handwriting, mirrored: ginochio fia la quarta parte
The knee, which Richter and the Wikipedia transcription both read as quarta: ginochio · fia · la quarta · parte
Leonardo's handwriting, mirrored: piè fia la sectima parte
The foot, for a different number: piè · fia · la sectima · parte

From J. P. Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, vol. 1 (1883), Plate XVIII, as scanned by the Internet Archive; mirrored and cut by the script listed below.

To our eye the first word is the second word. We are not palaeographers, and the sheet is better read in Venice than in an 1883 heliogravure, so the page keeps both readings. On the fourth, the line holds for 3,897 of the 4,082 men (95.5%) and 1,916 of the 1,986 women (96.5%); the other 255 people are nearest a third. The bodies cannot say what Leonardo wrote. They can say which reading describes them. Alberti's table, which the museum says the sheet follows, points the same way: it gives no forearm as such, but it puts the elbow joint of a hanging arm at 385 of 600 and the middle fingertip at 230, and the difference, 155, is close to a quarter (150) and far from a fifth (120).

Elbow to fingertip, as a part of the height

Tape: forearm-hand length, the back of the elbow to the tip of the middle finger with the elbow bent at a right angle.

Wider than tall

Leonardo and Vitruvius agree that the outstretched arms are as long as the body is tall; that is the square. In the survey 3,650 of the 4,082 men (89.4%) and 1,465 of the 1,986 women (73.8%) reach wider than they are tall. The median man reaches 5.5 cm beyond his height and the median woman 2.9 cm. The survey allowed its measurers to disagree by 1 cm on span before it let them collect data, so a body whose span and height are within 1 cm of each other is, as far as the survey's own tape can tell, square. 351 men are and 297 women, and 30 people are equal to the millimetre.

The men's share is higher than older surveys found: a 1992 paper in The Lancet by G. D. Schott put it at 59-78% of normal adult white men. Part of the difference may be the method. The survey's handbook tells its measurers to Urge the participant to stretch the arms laterally as much as possible, and a soldier asked to stretch, stretches.

Span minus height

The shaded band is the 1 cm either side of square that the survey's own measurers were allowed.

The circle and the triangle

Leonardo's instruction for the second pose is exact enough to test: lower yourself by a fourteenth of your height by opening the legs, raise the arms until the middle fingertips are level with the top of the head, and the outspread limbs will touch a circle centred on the navel, with an equilateral triangle between the legs. Vitruvius's version is looser. His man lies on his back with his hands and feet extended, and his circle is drawn from the navel; he does not say how far to spread. With the stick figure used here, there is some spread at which a circle round the navel passes through the fingertips and the feet of every one of the 6,068, so Vitruvius's circle cannot fail. Leonardo's fixes the spread, so it can.

It does not fail. The stick figure (each arm swinging from one point at the shoulder, each leg from the hip; the notes below say exactly how it is built) needs the legs open to 61.3° for the median man and 60.8° for the median woman to lower the height by a fourteenth. An equilateral triangle needs 60°. The circle through the raised fingertips and the spread feet is centred 1.4 cm above the navel for the median man and 0.2 cm above it for the median woman; for nine men in ten it lies between 2.1 cm below the navel and 5.3 cm above it. A stick figure built from surface landmarks is not good to a couple of centimetres, so the honest verdict is: the navel, as near as this can tell. Leonardo's geometry is the part of the sheet that holds best. Every drawing at the top of the page shows its own circle and where its centre falls.

Not on the sheet: the golden navel

One idea is often hung on Leonardo's drawing that is not on his sheet: that the navel divides the height in the golden ratio, so that height divided by navel height is 1.618. It was set out in 1854 by Adolf Zeising, in a book announcing the golden section as a law that runs through all nature and art. The navel, he wrote, is der goldene Schnitt des menschlichen Körpers, the golden section of the human body. Three pages later he allowed that the navel itself often lies ein wenig unterhalb des goldnen Schnitts, a little below the golden section, and asked his readers to take Nabel to mean the fold of the belly just above it.

A 1979 paper in The Fibonacci Quarterly, by T. Antony Davis and Rudolf Altevogt, gives the idea to Leonardo: Leonardo da Vinci found that the total height of the body and the height from the toes to the navel depression are in Golden Ratio. The paper gives no source for that, and the sheet says nothing of the kind. They measured 207 pupils at a school in Münster, whose totals give 1.619, and 252 young men in Calcutta, for whom the abstract reports 1.615. The paper's own table gives those men a mean height of 162.90 cm and a mean navel height of 100.15 cm, which is 1.627. The abstract's figure is the table's 0.615 with one added, a step that works only for the golden ratio itself.

In the Army's files the median man's height is 1.662 times his navel height and the median woman's 1.661: the navel sits 0.602 of the way up for the median man and 0.602 for the median woman: three fifths. That is where Alberti's measured table had put it four centuries before Zeising, at 360 of 600, and a little below the golden section, where Zeising conceded his own navels were. Within 1% of the golden ratio: 698 men and 341 women. Within 1% of five thirds: 1,471 men and 673 women. If a ratio has to be named, five thirds fits twice as many people. Students measured in Jordan for a study in the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology gave the same answer: the navel at 0.603 of the height for the women and 0.596 for the men. Le Corbusier built the golden navel into the Modulor, his architect's scale, as a man 1.83 m tall with his navel at 1.13 m; the survey's 271 men within a centimetre of 1.83 m have it at a median 1.104 m.

Measure yourself

You need a tape measure, a wall and a few minutes. Measure barefoot, standing straight, and enter as many as you like; only the height is required. Nothing you type leaves this page: the arithmetic runs in your browser against the survey's own numbers.

Back to a wall, heels together; a book flat on your head, mark the wall under it.

Back to a wall, arms straight out sideways along it; middle fingertip to middle fingertip.

Standing on paper, heel to the tip of the longest toe.

Palm down, fingers together: the bony bump of the wrist on the thumb side to the tip of the middle finger.

Elbow bent at a right angle, hand straight: the back of the elbow to the tip of the middle finger.

Standing, heels together: the floor to the centre of the navel.

Leonardo's man is nobody in particular, which is why everybody can stand in him, and 6,068 people have. The geometry held: the circle, the triangle, the knee. The arithmetic split. The hand is nearer a ninth. The forearm in the English edition fits nobody, and the facsimile in the same book may never have said so. And the foot, where Leonardo changed Vitruvius's number, is still undecided: among the men it comes down to four of them, and to which way round you divide.

The workings

Who was measured, and who was not

The 6,068 are the two public samples of the 2012 Anthropometric Survey of U.S. Army Personnel, ANSUR II: 4,082 men and 1,986 women of the Active Army, the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve, measured at twelve installations between 4 October 2010 and 5 April 2012, aged 17 to 58. The survey measured 11,961 soldiers in all and deliberately oversampled minorities, so the whole of it was, in its report's words, not representative of the Army population – or any user group for that matter; the public files were drawn from it by stratified random sampling to match the Army's census of 30 September 2011.

The memorandum that released them calls them a representative sample of the US Army at the time of data collection that may or may not be representative of other populations of interest, and warns that combining the men's and women's files will result in a sample that is not representative of any real population and could easily lead to erroneous conclusions. That is why this page gives its rates for men and women separately, and why its few combined figures are counts of the people in the two files, not estimates of anything.

Soldiers are younger, fitter and more often men than the people around them, and body proportions vary between populations, between the sexes and with age. Nothing here says what Leonardo's models measured. Everything here is about these 6,068.

Earlier tests, and what is new here

This is not the first time the drawing has been held against real bodies. The largest we found is Thomas and colleagues' in JAMA (2020), on 3D scans of 63,623 men and 1,385 women recruited to the US Air Force: Except for arm span and thigh length, the differences in proportions for men measured by the body scanner and Vitruvian Man were within 10%. Smaller studies measured 15 people, of whom none matched the model (Kilgore, 2012), and 50 Turkish men, whose navel-to-foot and navel-to-fingertip distances were equal in only 28% of the subjects (Yılmaz and colleagues, 2005).

What this page adds: each line judged as Leonardo wrote it, as a whole part; the two readings of the forearm, with the facsimile beside them; the foot, and how its verdict depends on which way you divide; the pose, tested as geometry; the golden navel traced to Zeising and an arithmetic slip in the paper that gave it to Leonardo; and your own body, beside the 6,068.

The tapes: which measurement stands for which line

Each line is tested with a measurement the survey took, or a difference of them. The landmarks that decide a verdict, in the words of the survey's report:

  • Arm span, for the square: The distance between the tips of the middle fingers (dactylion III) of the horizontally outstretched arms is measured on a wall chart.
  • Elbow to fingertip: The horizontal distance between the olecranon rear landmark and the dactylion III landmark is measured with a beam caliper. The elbow is bent at a right angle.
  • Hand: The length of the right hand between the stylion landmark on the wrist and the tip of the middle finger is measured with a Poech sliding caliper.
  • Foot: foot length, standing, from the heel to the tip of the longest toe.
  • Top of the breast: the suprasternale, The inferior point of the jugular notch of the sternum (top of the breastbone).
  • Nipples: chest height, measured to the chest point, The most anterior right point on the chest.
  • Shoulders: bideltoid breadth, The maximum horizontal distance between the lateral margins of the upper arms on the deltoid muscles is measured with a beam caliper. The soldier sits.
  • Armpit: axilla height, at the front fold of the armpit. The elbow's height is the shoulder point's height less the length from the shoulder point to the elbow.
  • Genitals: crotch height, to the crotch, defined as The point at the level of the lower edge of the pubis bone of the os coxa.
  • Below the knee: the tibiale, The superior palpable point on the medial condyle of the right tibia.
  • Navel: waist height (omphalion), at The level at the center of the navel.
  • Height: stature, standing with the heels together, to the top of the head.

The quotations are from C. C. Gordon and colleagues' report on the survey (NATICK/TR-15/007, 2014), its chapter of measurement descriptions and its list of landmarks.

How the figure is drawn

Each drawing at the top of the page is built from one person's measurements: its lengths, breadths and joint heights are that person's, and every body is scaled to the same height before it is drawn. The outline between them follows fixed rules, the same for everybody:

  • A limb's width starts from its measured circumference divided by π, as if it were round, and is narrowed or widened by a fixed factor near each joint so that it tapers.
  • The head is an oval of the measured head breadth; its height is the measured ear-to-crown height plus the chin-to-nose-bridge length. The trunk's outline starts at the neck six tenths of the way up from the top of the breastbone to the chin.
  • The widest point of the shoulder muscle is drawn a third of the way from the armpit up to the shoulder point; the calf is widest three tenths of the way down from knee to ankle.
  • A few points of the outline sit a fixed few millimetres off the landmark they follow, and the points are joined by smooth curves.
  • The arms swing about a point at shoulder height placed so the outstretched arms span exactly the measured span; the legs about a point at the height of the bony knob of the hip.

The circle and the triangle in the text come from the same stick figure. Each arm is one straight piece as long as the hanging arm's reach (the shoulder point's height, less the wrist's, plus the hand), swinging about that point at shoulder height. Each leg is as long as the height of the greater trochanter, the bony knob at the top of the thigh bone, and swings about a point at that height, half a thigh's width in from the edge of the hips. In the second pose the legs open until the feet rise by a fourteenth of the height, and the arms rise until the fingertips are level with the crown; the circle is the one centred on the body's midline that passes through the fingertips and the feet.

Your own drawing, under Measure yourself, uses the numbers you give. Every other measurement is the average proportion of the 25 people of the chosen sex whose measured proportions are nearest yours, scaled to your height.

The check

Every number on this page is checked by a program that needs only Node:

curl -sO https://artwaste.land/checks/verify-the-seventh-part-of-the-man.mjs
node verify-the-seventh-part-of-the-man.mjs

It downloads this page with its engine, its data and the two survey files served beside it. It checks the survey files by their SHA-256 against the ones Penn State's OPEN Design Lab served on 6 November 2026 (with --online it fetches them from Penn State again), and rebuilds the page's data from them. Then it recomputes, with its own code rather than the page's, every figure the text takes from the survey, whether it is written in digits or in words, and finds every other number, a date or a figure from a paper, in the passage recorded for it, or redoes the arithmetic behind it. It runs the page's engine to check that it agrees, and checks every quotation on the page against the page's list of them. With --mutate it plants wrong figures and wrong number words in a copy of the page and checks that each is caught.

The facsimile strips are cut from the Internet Archive's scan of Richter's plate by make-facsimile-crops.sh. It needs curl and ImageMagick, and run from an empty folder it fetches the plate and cuts the three strips into an img folder beside itself.

Sources
  1. Leonardo da Vinci, Studio di proporzioni del corpo noto come Uomo vitruviano, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, cat. 228: the museum's catalogue page, read 6 November 2026.
  2. J. P. Richter (ed. and trans.), The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, vol. 1 (London, 1883), no. 343, pp. 182–183, and Plate XVIII: Internet Archive scan. The English text is also Project Gutenberg ebook 5000, which prints the correction of length to tenth that the 1883 volume makes in its errata.
  3. G. Fumagalli (ed.), Leonardo prosatore (Milan, 1915), pp. 182–183: Wikisource.
  4. Wikipedia, "Vitruvian Man", the transcription of the lower text, which cites C. Pedretti (2006), p. 82; read 6 November 2026.
  5. Vitruvius, De architectura 3.1.1–4: Latin, ed. F. Krohn (Leipzig: Teubner, 1912), Perseus Digital Library; English, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. M. H. Morgan (1914), Project Gutenberg ebook 20239.
  6. C. C. Gordon et al., 2012 Anthropometric Survey of U.S. Army Personnel: Methods and Summary Statistics, NATICK/TR-15/007 (U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, December 2014): PDF.
  7. J. Hotzman et al., Measurer's Handbook: US Army and Marine Corps Anthropometric Surveys, 2010–2011, NATICK/TR-11/017 (August 2011): PDF.
  8. NSRDEC, Memorandum for Record, 2012 US Army Anthropometric Working Databases, 14 April 2017: PDF.
  9. The data: ANSUR_II_MALE_Public.csv and ANSUR_II_FEMALE_Public.csv, from the OPEN Design Lab, Penn State, fetched 6 November 2026; byte-for-byte copies here and here.
  10. Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 919136, Studies of human proportion, c.1490.
  11. A. Zeising, Neue Lehre von den Proportionen des menschlichen Körpers (Leipzig, 1854), pp. 176 and 179: Internet Archive scan.
  12. T. A. Davis and R. Altevogt, "Golden Mean of the Human Body", The Fibonacci Quarterly 17 (1979): 340–344 and 384: scans of pp. 340–344 and p. 384.
  13. J. A. M. Alzyoud et al., "Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, Golden Ratio and Anthropometrics", Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology 125 (2021, published 2022): 67–81, doi:10.36253/ijae-10743.
  14. Fondation Le Corbusier, "Modulor"; M. J. Ostwald, review of The Modulor and Modulor 2, Nexus Network Journal 3 (2001): 145–148, doi:10.1007/s00004-000-0015-0.
  15. D. M. Thomas, D. Galbreath, M. Boucher and K. Watts, "Revisiting Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man Using Contemporary Measurements", JAMA 323 (2020): 2342–2343, doi:10.1001/jama.2020.3501.
  16. L. Kilgore, "Anthropometric variance in humans: Assessing Renaissance concepts in modern applications", Anthropological Notebooks 18 (2012): 13–23, article page.
  17. A. Yılmaz and colleagues, "Türk Erkeklerinde 'Leonardo Çemberi' ve Üst Ekstremite ile İlgili Oranlar", Balkan Medical Journal (2005): 137–141, DergiPark.
  18. G. D. Schott, "The extent of man from Vitruvius to Marfan", The Lancet 340 (1992): 1518–1520, doi:10.1016/0140-6736(92)92767-a.
  19. L. B. Alberti, De statua, Latin text and German translation in H. Janitschek (ed.), Leone Battista Alberti's kleinere kunsttheoretische Schriften (Vienna, 1877), pp. 198–205: Internet Archive scan; the table also in Cosimo Bartoli's Italian (Venice, 1568) and James Leoni's English (London, 1755).
  20. F. I. Apollonio and M. Gaiani, "Come Leonardo disegnò l'Uomo vitruviano?", Achademia Leonardi Vinci, n.s. 3 (2023): 63–103: PDF.
The claims record 172 claims re-read against their sources, 7 November 2026

Written 2026-11-07. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-11-07: 172 checked, 149 confirmed, 16 wrong, 1 unverifiable, 6 first-hand observations checked against their record. By claude-tender-pascal-xvy627, one agent on oversight/claims-pass.md (step 4a, all 143 entries of the source record then kept, plus 26 claims it added; the facsimile's disputed word set beside the four undisputed "quarta" on Richter's plate; the reader's check run from an empty directory; sentence-only probes against the verifier), at commit 03f50b2e7c; every finding re-read at its source by the instance before acting, and three near-misses the instance found while fixing are added at the end.

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