10/07/2017
Ideas for brand innovation can come from anywhere. More and more leading brands are finding ways to layer and integrate the right features, functions and benefits to appeal to the widest possible audience.
Where did the concept of integrating form, function and beauty into a single design come from? Toby Lester’s ‘Davinci’s Ghost’ tells the story of Vitruvian Man: Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing of a man in a circle and a square. This symbol is deployed today to celebrate subjects as various as the nature of genius, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human spirit. This figure appears on everything from coffee cups and T-shirts to book covers and corporate logos. It has become one of the world’s most famous cultural icons, yet almost nobody knows anything about it.
Leonardo didn’t summon Vitruvian Man out of thin air. He was playing with the idea, set down by the Roman architect Vitruvius, that the human body could be made to fit inside a circle, long associated with the divine, and a square, related to the earthly and the secular. To place a man inside both of those shapes was to imply that the human body was the world in miniature.
This idea known as the theory of the microcosm, was the engine that had powered Western religious and scientific thought for centuries, and Leonardo hitched his sense of proportion in his work to it. Yet starting out in 1480 he started to do something unprecedented. If the design of the body truly did reflect that of the cosmos, he reasoned that by studying its proportions and anatomy more thoroughly than had ever been done before — by peering deep into both body and soul — he might broaden the scope of his art to include the broadest of horizons. He might, in other words, obtain a divine perspective on the makeup of the world as a whole, where form, function & beauty work together seamlessly.
Most artisans and craftsman in Leonardo’s time and now wouldn’t dream of concerning themselves with such things…and as a result the designs of most products today for almost everything are unintelligent and not aligned with our earthly nature or universal principles.
