Room 17’s Vitruvian Man Results

A Roman man Vitruvius in the 1st century BC stated that a perfect man’s proportion was that his height was the same as his arm span.

Leonardo da Vinci (an artist, scientist, architect) created an image that reflected this theory in art, which represented humanity as perfect and ideal. This artwork is called ‘Vitruvian Man’ which is a study of the human form visually perfected through mathematics.

Naturalism was important too when they tried to figure out the proper proportions of the human body, the reason why the body was naked.

Vitruvius’s Proportions stated that:

• With arms outstretched, a man is as wide as he is as tall.
• The chest is the same width as a quarter of the height
• The measurement from the elbow to the fingertips is also a ¼ of the height.
• The nose is ½ way between the hairline and the chin.
• The eyebrows are ½ way between the nose and the hairline.
• The lips are ½ way between the nose and the chin.
• The head is ⅛ the total  height
• The hand is 1/10 of the total height.
• The foot is ⅙ of the total height.

As a class, we measured our arm spans and heights to see if we compared to the people of Vitruvius's time.

Five students did match with the theory.

We came up with lots of variables to reasons why there were differences.

the two major ones were:

• We have a better diet, so we are taller than men who lived around 1BC.
• As life spans were shorter then, there were fewer people who reached the adult height as well.

The data was presented in a scatter graph.

We were looking at patterns, outliers and the setting out of the data as part of the maths lesson.