Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a male figure perfectly inscribed in a circle and square, known as the “Vitruvian Man,” illustrates what he believed to be a divine connection between the human form and the universe. Beloved for its beauty and symbolic power, it is one of the most famous images in the world. However, new research suggests that the work, which dates to 1490, may be a copy of an earlier drawing by Leonardo’s friend.

Another illustration of a divinely proportioned man — the subject is Christ-like, but the setting is strikingly similar to Leonardo’s — has been discovered in a forgotten manuscript in Ferrara, Italy. Both drawings are depictions of a passage written 1,500 years earlier by Vitruvius, an ancient Roman architect, in which he describes a man’s body fitting perfectly inside a circle (the divine symbol) and inside a square (the earthly symbol). It was a geometric interpretation of the ancient belief that man is a “microcosm”: a miniature embodiment of the whole universe. Leonardo and other scholars revived this vainglorious notion during the Italian Renaissance.

After decades of study, Claudio Sgarbi, an Italian architectural historian who discovered the lesser known illustration of the Vitruvian man in 1986, now believes it to be the work of Giacomo Andrea de Ferrara, a Renaissance architect, expert on Vitruvius, and close friend of Leonardo’s. What’s more, Sgarbi believes Giacomo Andrea probably drew his Vitruvian man first, though the two men are likely to have discussed their mutual efforts. Sgarbi will lay out his arguments in a volume of academic papers to be published this winter, Smithsonian Magazine reports.

The key arguments are as follows: In Leonardo’s writings, he mentions “Giacomo Andrea’s Vitruvius” — seemingly a direct reference to the illustrated Ferrara manuscript. Secondly, Leonardo had dinner with Giacomo Andrea in July 1490, the year in which both men are thought to have drawn their Vitruvian men. Experts believe Leonardo would have probed Giacomo Andrea’s knowledge of Vitruvius when they met. And though both drawings interpret Vitruvius’ words similarly, Leonardo’s is perfectly executed, while Giacomo Andrea’s is full of false starts and revisions, none of which would have been necessary if he had simply copied Leonardo’s depiction.

Other scholars find the arguments convincing. “I find Sgarbi’s argument exciting and very seductive, to say the least,” said Indra McEwen, an architectural historian at Concordia University who has written extensively about the works of Vitruvius. “But [I] would opt for the view that Giacomo Andrea and Leonardo worked in tandem, rather than Leonardo basing his drawing on Andrea’s.”

Rather than competitors, the two Renaissance men were colleagues working together to bring a beautiful, ancient idea back to life. “Whose was the ‘original’ drawing is a non-question as far as I’m concerned. Much as it is a preoccupation of our own time, I don’t think it would have been an issue in Leonardo’s day,” McEwen told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.

Patrice Le Floch-Prigent, an anatomist at the University of Versailles in France who has analyzed the anatomical correctness of Leonardo’s famous work, noted that, for both drawings, “the source is Vitruvius.”

Furthermore, regardless of their chronology, Leonardo’s work is an improvement on Giacomo Andrea’s, McEwen said: “Leonardo is by far the superior draftsman, with a far superior understanding of anatomy.”

Leonardo’s is also more faithful to the text, she explained. “Nowhere does Vitruvius say that the man is positioned inside the circle and the square at the same time. A man lying flat on his back, can be circumscribed by a circle if his hands and feet are outstretched,” writes Vitruvius. “Similarly, his height is equal to his arm span, ‘just as in areas that have been squared with a set square.’” Giacomo Andrea’s figure has only one set of arms and legs, which are simultaneously circumscribed by a circle and outlined by a square, while “Leonardo deals with [the two propositions] by having the position of his man’s arms and legs change. That, I would have to admit, makes his drawing a closer approximation to the textual description than Giacomo Andrea’s,” McEwen wrote.

One thing is certain. The better Vitruvian man gained international fame, while the simpler, but possibly more original, one was left to languish in a library for five centuries. That may have to do with the very different fates met by Leonardo and Giacomo Andrea. When the French invaded Milan in 1499, the former fled to safety and went on to achieve eternal renown. The latter stayed in Milan and was hanged, drawn and quartered by the French, and largely forgotten by history — until now.

In the summer of 1508 Leonardo returned to Milan, which was to be his headquarters for the next five years. His chief patron was still Charles d’Amboise, Lord of Chaumont, who remained governor of Milan till his death in 1511. Early in his life d’Amboise had been touched by the spirit of the Renaissance, and in Milan he tried to revive or maintain the civilisation of the Sforzas. Of this civilisation Leonardo had been the greatest glory, and we know that d’Amboise treated him with the utmost consideration. As with the Sforzas he was not simply court painter, but architect, engineer and general artistic adviser. A few designs for architecture, dating from about this period, are in the Codice Atlantico and at Windsor.

Among them are plans and elevations of a town house with classical orders and various suggestions for wells and fountains. The British Museum MS. of 1508 also contains his longest writings on architecture, a study of fissures in walls and vaults, which suggest that he was employed in restoring and conserving as well as building. One day he would be deciding on the form of the choir stalls in the Duomo; another, acting as military engineer in the war against Venice; another, arranging pageants for the entry of Louis XII into Milan. It was a variety of employment which Leonardo enjoyed, but which has left posterity the poorer.

In these years he also travelled extensively, and although we have many clues as to the course of these journeys we have no hint as to their purpose. They do not seem to be connected with any recorded commission, and it is possible that they were undertaken solely in order to make those observations of nature which were one of the chief interests of his later years. MS. F, dated 22 September 1508 and entitled Di mondo ed acque, is the first of a series containing notes on geology, botany, atmosphere and kindred subjects. Although Leonardo’s approach has become more scientific, he still sees with the eye of a painter. His notes on botany describe the ramifications of a tree and the disposition of its leaves, in much the same spirit as Ruskin in the fifth book of Modern Painters. Many pages of MS. G are concerned with light striking on trees, the various greens of transparent leaves, and the blue sheen which they reflect from the sky.

The same book contains valuable notes of what Leonardo called la prospettiva di colore, the modification of colour by atmosphere; in fact, such observations seem to have been one of the chief motives of his mountaineering expeditions. A drawing of the Alps at Windsor, 1 one of a beautiful series in red chalk on red paper, contains an elaborate note of the colour of mountain flowers when seen through a great gulf of intervening air at a considerable height. There are also notes on the colour of smoke and mist which remind us of Goethe, and only his dislike of formulas prevented him from anticipating Goethe’s principle of translucency. In these writings Leonardo anticipated the impressionist doctrine that everything is more or less reflected in everything else and that there are no such things as black shadows. Meanwhile, his paintings were growing more and more shadowy, so that his last work, the equivocal St John in the Louvre, only just emerges from a welter of darkness.

During these expeditions into the mountains he became interested in problems of geology, and in particular the question of why shells and fossilised marine life can be found high up in mountains many miles inland. The thoroughness, tenacity and candour with which in several pages of the Trivulzian MS. he deals with this problem is an admirable example of his mind at work. He never for a moment admits the idea of a special creation, and he advances decisive arguments against the idea that the shells were carried there by the Flood. Ultimately he assumes that the country has been covered by the sea and sets to work to discover how this can have taken place. Thus his geological observations, taken in conjunction with his studies of embryology and comparative anatomy, show him ready to entertain the whole idea of evolution with a scientific open-mindedness in advance of many distinguished scientists of the nineteenth century.

This study of geology is sometimes quoted as evidence of Leonardo’s drift away from art to science; but I need hardly repeat that Leonardo’s researches, however austere, became fused with the texture of his imagination. His study of the earth’s bones is no exception. He had always been interested in rock formations, and to about the years 1508-10 belong a series of drawings at Windsor which show him studying outcrops and disturbed stratification, where the rock has broken through the comfortable humus, and reveals the ancient, grim foundations on which living things have their precarious existence.

This sense of the world as a planet, seen from a point of distance at which human life is no longer visible, is given final expression in the background of the Virgin and St Anne, now in the Louvre. There are no documents for this work, but the studies for it which have come down to us, no less than the whole character of the composition, suggests a date after Leonardo’s return to Milan and perhaps as late as is 1510. Only the vast and delicate landscape was coloured by Leonardo’s own hand. The painting of the heads is insensitive and without the fine texture of the Mona Lisa.

Parts of it are unfinished–the drapery covering the Virgin’s legs, for example, which is no more than an outline. Yet we know how subtle, musical and close-knit this passage could have been from drawings in the Louvre and at Windsor, showing the elaborate preparations he made for all his work, although when the time came to use these studies in a picture his inborn distaste for finality forced him to leave it unfinished. Even more interesting than these drapery studies is Leonardo’s own drawing for the St Anne’s head. The differences between it and the head in the painting are no doubt partly due to Leonardo himself.

It was he, for instance, who changed the head-dress in order to give a sharper accent to the pyramidal group, and he may have done something to make her type more regular. But the difference must also be due to the head being painted by a pupil and is an example of a well-known truth, that a great man’s pupils are plus royaliste que le roi. The conventionally Leonardesque expression of the painted St Anne has a certain charm and an artificial air of mystery, but the human mystery of the drawing is deeper and more subtle.

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What Aloha Means

Aloha in the Hawaiian language means affection, love, peace, compassion and mercy. Since the middle of the 19th century, it also has come to be used as an English greeting to say goodbye and hello. Currently, it is mostly used in the sense of hello; however, it is used as the above. It is also the state nickname of Hawaii, the “Aloha State”. The word aloha derives from the Proto-Polynesian root *qarofa, and ultimately from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian.

It has cognates in other Polynesian languages, such as Samoan alofa and Māori aroha, also meaning “love.” A folk etymology claims that it derives from a compound of the Hawaiian words alo meaning “presence”, “front”, “face”, or “share”; and ha, meaning “breath of life” or “essence of life.” Although alo does indeed mean “presence” etc., the word for breath is spelled with a macron or kahakō over the a (hā) whereas the word aloha does not have a long a. The use of the word as a greeting has been reconstructed to Proto-Polynesian.

Before contact with the West, other words used for greeting included welina and anoai. Today, “aloha kakahiaka” is the phrase for “good morning.” “Aloha ʻauinalā” means “good afternoon” and “aloha ahiahi” means “good evening.” “Aloha kākou” is a common form of “welcome to all.” In modern Hawaii, numerous businesses have aloha in their names, with more than 3 pages of listings in the Oʻahu phone book alone.

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The Year of the Dragon

The Lunar New Year is celebrated in China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia, and Tibet, as well is in countries such as Singapore that have large Chinese populations. Christopher Livaccari of the Asia Society explains to Yahoo! Shine that it used to be celebrated widely in Japan, but now most Japanese people consider January 1st to be the main New Year’s holiday.

This year’s Lunar New Year begins on January 23, which is the first day of the first new moon of the year. It ends 15 days later on the full moon. The Chinese calendar is divided into 12 cycles each represented by a special animal. According to Chinese Astrology, this year is the year of the Dragon, the only mythical animal in the zodiac. People born in the year of the Dragon are said to be energetic, charismatic, and natural born leaders. Some famous “Dragons” include Joan of Arc, Vladimir Putin, and John Lennon.

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