Leonardo da Vinci

leonardo da vinci treated painting and anatomy as the same study — both were ways of seeing how a body holds itself in space. he completed perhaps fifteen paintings in his life and was constantly distracted by hydraulics, flight, war machines, the structure of the human heart. vitruvian man (c. 1490) is the famous one: a notebook page worked out from a passage in vitruvius's de architectura, proving the body's proportions could be inscribed in both a circle and a square. it became the diagram everybody borrows from.