Posted on 11/30/2025 5:17:49 PM PST by Red Badger
A third shape hidden in the infamous Vitruvian Man drawing suggests an even deeper understanding of human anatomy than previously known.
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
* A London-based dentist spotted a “hidden in plain sight” third shape within Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man drawing.
* The 1490 illustration was originally created to demonstrate a principle theorized by the Roman architect Vitruvius—that the human body could proportionally fit within both a circle and a square.
* The dentist noticed that a third shape in the drawing—a triangle between the figure’s legs—was reminiscent of a dental principle known as Bonwill’s triangle.
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This story is a collaboration with Biography.com
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Art, by its nature, often lends itself to multiple readings or interpretations. What one takes away from a work of art depends not just on what the artist brought to it when they sat down to put pen to paper or paint to canvass, but what the observer brings to the piece when they look upon it.
That’s precisely what happened recently, when a British dentist took a look at one of the most iconic images ever drawn: Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (c. 1490)
A familiar image to most today, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man was drawn by the artist in 1490, after he was inspired by the writings of the Roman architect Vitruvius.
In his work De architectura (translated as On Architecture), Vitruvius mused on the symmetry of the ideal human form, pointing to the navel as the central point of the body from which all else extends. “For if a man be placed flat on his back,” he wrote, “...with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centred at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom.” But this was not the only shape that Vitruvius noticed could fit the human form:
“And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same as the height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square.” Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing—made centuries after Vitruvius’ musings—illustrates the manner in which man could indeed fit within those described shapes. But, as ArtNet News recently reported, the famed polymath and Renaissance man may have stowed away a third shape hidden within his drawing, one which was only recently been remarked upon.
Dr. Rory Mac Sweeney, the aforementioned dentist, published his assessment in the Journal of Mathematics and Arts, that Leonardo’s famed drawing “incorporates geometric principles that anticipate modern understanding of optimal biological architecture,” by way of a third shape, located between the man’s legs: an equilateral triangle.
“According to Sweeney,” ArtNet News wrote, “[...] this triangle corresponds to ‘Bonwill’s triangle,’ formed by the contact point of the mandibular central incisors and the right and left mandibular condyles.”
Journal of the New York Institute of Stomatology
An illustration of Bonwill’s triangle, published in a 1906 edition of the Journal of the New York Institute of Stomatology, American Academy of Dental Science, Harvard Odontological Society and the Metropolitan District (Massachusetts State Society)
The namesake Bonwill here is Dr. William Bonwill, whose 1864 work on the Articulation of the Teeth built upon the study of “4,000 dentures in living persons and 6,000 skulls” to establish a standard for a denture shape, one described by the Journal of the New York Institute of Stomatology as “an arch based on the equilateral triangle and conforming closely to the most perfect arches found.”
Of course, it would take a dentist to notice a principle of dentistry tucked away in Leonardo’s drawing. But the triangle’s relevance to Sweeney’s expertise, while the initial impetus for his observation, is not the only purpose that he believes the shape serves in the work. Noticing the other element, however, requires going back to the work that precedes even Leonardo da Vinci: the musings of Vitruvius on the idea of the central navel.
The equilateral triangle observed between the legs of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man reaches its peak at the figure’s navel. If, Sweeney posits, one were to create five more triangles of equal dimension all originating from that navel point, it would create the “hexagonal pattern behind the ratio of approximately 1.64—a tetrahedral ratio—between the square’s side and the circle’s radius,” which Sweeney describes as “a mathematical relationship that defines optimal spatial arrangements in both synthetic and biological systems.”
Sweeney even draws parallels between the ratios found in Leonardo’s illustration and Buckminster Fuller’s Isotropic Vector Matrix from 1975, concluding that “the same geometric relationships that appear in optimal crystal structures, biological architectures, and Fuller’s coordinate systems seem to be encoded in human proportions, suggesting that Leonardo intuited fundamental truths about the mathematical nature of reality itself.”
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DaVinci Ping!............
B E S U R E T O D R I N K Y O U R O V A L T I N E
The drawing is of a maxilla but the text describes the mandible.
anything with dentistry I am afarid of
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