Vitruvius, Roman engineer and architect, wrote: "“No temple can be put together coherently unless it conforms exactly to the principle relating the members of a well-shaped man.”
Last year,
Bloomberg reviewed a book by Toby Lester on the origins of the basic principles of classical architecture, which derived from the male body; in the ultimate act of anthropomorphizaton, these principles were later applied to cosmology:
In “Da Vinci’s Ghost,” the
journalist Toby Lester peers closely at Leonardo’s
“Vitruvian Man” -- its origins, its meaning and the
circumstances of the artist who drew it.
It’s called “Vitruvian Man” because the idea for it
came from “Ten Books on Architecture,” written by a Roman
military engineer named Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. For the
Romans, architecture meant proportion, which meant the
body.
... Vitruvius
wrote ...: “If a man were placed on his back with his hands and
feet outspread, and the point of a compass put on his
navel, both his fingers and his toes would be touched by
the line of the circle going around him.”
Similarly, for a perfectly proportioned man with feet
together and hands outspread (a posture that later would
inevitably betoken the crucified Christ), “you would find
the breadth the same as the height, just as in areas that
have been squared with a set square.”
Over time, the notion of the body as the locus
classicus of proportion became tied to the relationship
between the body and the cosmos -- the microcosm and the
macrocosm. The 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen put
it this way:
“The firmament, as it were, is man’s head; sun, moon
and stars are as the eyes; air as the hearing; the winds
are as smell; dew as taste; the sides of the world are as
arms and as touch.”
The core geometric archetypes, the triangle, the circle, the square, were mapped onto the male body. Buildings conceived on these patterns symbolized the spiritual, mental and physical gifts of the ideal human male.
Although I have previously questioned the health of global societies which have
for the past two thousand years relied upon male divinity as the measuring stick of civilization, it is also true that diminished masculinity is a cause for concern.
The post-World War II media, technological and communications revolutions have spawned a lot of
cyber Cassanovas and deskchair quarterbacks. These not-men
cultivate the anti-heroism of our age, who contradict everything to which Theodore Roosevelt referred in his famous
'Man in the Arena' speech at the Sorbonne in Paris on 23 September 1910:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
We, by contrast, live in a crumbling patriarchy whose points of reference are the sensitive
vegetarian vampire or
drone-assisted democracy. There is a world of difference between real masculine virtues and patriarchal domination based on masculine weakness.
Are men really becoming less manly? This development caught the attention of the bloggers at
The Art of Manliness, who observe that testosterone levels have been falling in America over the past decades; in fact,
this problem is happening worldwide.
