A dentist has discovered a hidden code in Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous drawing

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• A London dentist noticed a third shape “hidden in plain sight” in 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 fit proportionally into 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.

This story is a collaboration with Biography.com

Art, by its nature, often lends itself to multiple readings or interpretations. What one takes from a work of art depends not only on what the artist brings to it when he sits down to put pen to paper or paint to canvas, but what the observer brings to the piece when he looks at it.

That’s exactly 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.

A familiar image to most today, of Leonardo Vitruvian Man it was drawn by the artist in 1490, after being inspired by the writings of the Roman architect Vitruvius.

In his work About architecture (translated as about architecture), Vitruvius meditated on the symmetry of the ideal human form, pointing to the navel as the central point of the body from which all others extend. “For if a man be seated on his back,” he wrote, “…with his hands and feet outstretched, and a pair of compasses centered on the navel, the fingers and toes of the two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described there.” But this was not the only shape that Vitruvius observed that could fit the human form:

“And as the human body gives a circular outline, so a square figure may be found out of 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’s thoughts—illustrates how man might actually fit into those described shapes. But, like ArtNet News Recently reported, the famous polymath and renaissance man may have hidden a hidden third form in his drawing, one that was only recently noticed.

Dr. Rory Mac Sweeney, the aforementioned dentist, published his review in Journal of Mathematics and Artsthat Leonardo’s famous drawing “incorporates geometric principles that anticipate the modern understanding of optimal biological architecture” by means of a third shape, located between the human legs: an equilateral triangle.

“After Sweeney,” ArtNet News wrote, “[…] this triangle corresponds to “Bonwill’s triangle”, formed by the point of contact of the mandibular central incisors and the right and left mandibular condyles.”

Bonwill’s namesake here is Dr. William Bonwill, whose 1864 paper on tooth articulation relied on the study of “4,000 dentures from living persons and 6,000 skulls” to establish a standard for a denture shape, one described by the Journal of the New York Dental Institute as “an equilateral triangle found on the nearest and most suitable arches.”

Of course, it would take a dentist to notice a principle of dentistry hidden in Leonardo’s drawing. But the relevance of the triangle to Sweeney’s expertise, while the initial impetus for his observation, is not the only purpose he believes the shape serves in the work. Noting the other element, however, requires us to return to the work that precedes even Leonardo da Vinci: Vitruvius’ thoughts on the idea of ​​a central navel.

The equilateral triangle seen between Leonardo’s legs Vitruvian Man it reaches its peak at the navel of the figure. If, Sweeney claims, one were to create five more triangles of equal size, all emanating from that navel point, one would create “the hexagonal pattern behind the ratio of about 1.64—a tetrahedral ratio—between the side of the square and the radius of the circle,” which Sweeney describes as “a mathematical relationship that defines optimal arrangements in both synthetic space systems.”

Sweeney even draws parallels between the ratios found in Leonardo’s illustration and Buckminster Fuller’s 1975 Isotropic Vector Matrix, concluding that “the same geometric relationships that appear in Fuller’s optimal crystal structures, biological architectures, and coordinate systems appear to be encoded in human proportions, suggesting that Leonardo intuited the fundamental mathematical nature of reality itself.”

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