Discuss the High Renaissance use Vitruvius’s ideas of symmetry, proportion, and ratio in visual art and architecture, citing one example for each of these arts

Question

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

1. For Vitruvius, the circle and square were the ideal shapes, and proportion was the geometrical equivalent of Pythagoras’ music of the spheres. Thus, the ideal human head “from the chin to the crown is an eighth” of the whole height, and the human body itself fits into the ideal musical interval of the octave. For Vitruvius, symmetry, proportion, and ratio derive from the perfection of the human figure in all its parts, and the perfectly symmetrical shapes of the circle and square find their source in the figure and are generated by the figure geometrically.
2. Leonardo had captured this notion in his Vitruvian Man, a drawing in which he placed the human figure at the center of a perfect circle inscribed over a square.
3. In Rome, Bramante quickly applied this emphasis on geometrical figures to one of his earliest commissions, a small freestanding circular chapel in the courtyard of a Spanish church in Rome, San Pietro in Montorio. The diameter of the shafts defines the entire plan. Each shaft is spaced four diameters from the next, and the colonnade they form is two diameters from the circular walls. The task of replacing Old St. Peter’s was a much larger project. In his plan, Bramante adopted the Vitruvian square, as illustrated in Leonardo’s drawing, placing inside it a Greek cross (a cross in which the upright and transverse shafts are of equal length and intersect at their middles) topped by a central dome purposely reminiscent of the giant dome of the Pantheon. The resultant central plan is essentially a circle inscribed in a square.