Da Vinci was wrong

The Vitruvian Man and the 8-heads-to-stature canon

I remember my high school years studying some art (as part of the History course, not as an Art course). I love history but I did not understand why we had to study Da Vinci, as he did not have a historical role rather than a cultural role, but our teacher instructed us to admire Da Vinci and his work as virtuous and groundbreaking.

But he was wrong. And I was not told so.

One of the most famous drawings of Da Vinci is the Vitruvian Man. In this work, Da Vinci exposed his belief that the ideal human proportions were determined by the harmonious proportions that he believed governed the universe, in the sense of the roman Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, from whom the drawing takes it name.

Back in the school, one of the assignments we had to study was this drawing, and I recall the teacher telling us that “the stature of the body is eight times the length of the head”. Suddenly all the class was getting out their rulers from their backpacks and measuring each other heads (with no method or rigor, of course) and after some roundings, consensus was promptly reached provided that there was some “minor” error: The proportion was correct. “The problem is that you are kids and the Vitruvian Man is an adult” stated the teacher, and with that excuse, that information was written in stone and remained in our minds.

Until some months ago, when I remembered that and as a joy, started tinkering with the Body Data we have at Naiz Fit.

First of all, let’s take a look at the stature data. We can find a somewhat normal distribution here. I took a sample of around 4.5K men from 18 to 65 years old from our database. The data sample is “spiky”, but it is more related with the fact that the data is continuous than (measured in milimeters) rather than error or dispersion.

The same happens with the Head Height. In this case as the measure of the head is around an order of magnitude lower than the stature, the sample is less spiky, but can be found that is of good statistical quality.

So, what happens when we cross those two variables?

Well, it turns out that there is no correlation. It is a big blob with a somewhat concentrated population but no signs of linear correlation between the two variables. I can tell you that I had some hope that the data correlated somehow, but that probably was the child in me begging for mercy, trying to convince the adult in me to not delete a memory of younger days.

Conclusion

I was a bad guy in this essay. I tried to fool you into the general notion that the real world and the idealized or platonic world are the same, and they aren’t. Da Vinci does not say anything about how bodies actually are, but how he thinks the virtuous body should be.

This “detail” is an error that permeates through all society. How many times around the day does preconceived things about how they should be get in the way of how they are? Why are we more comfortable with easy to remember -but wrong- rules rather than with what real data tells us?

Diversity, Ultrapersonalization, and even Long-Tail production are movements toward this, and that’s what I have been involved in for the last year and a half.

Here at Naiz we have a vision, that is to turn around the way the world is constructed regarding the interaction of our bodies with it. We think that we humans are building things for ourselves with a broken perception of our bodies, fueled by centuries of approximations and false premises about so many aspects of our body.

Some are fueled by religion, some by art, and other by the pursuit of perfection. But what the cruel data tells us is that all of them are crude approximations, which can be valid in the fields of art and culture, but completely wrong for designing things that we have to interact with.

This way, our vision is to help people build things thinking of the diversity of human bodies, so in the future, the world can adapt to our bodies and not our bodies to the world. We started with apparel and fashion, but we won’t end here.