Note 155 — Chapter I · (VIII.)

For Vasari, a practical artist, to commit himself to the statement that figures are made nine heads high, is somewhat extraordinary, for eight heads, the proportion given by Vitruvius (III, 1) is the extreme limit for a normal adult, and very few Greek statues, let alone living persons, have heads so small. The recently discovered ‘Agias’ by Lysippus, at Delphi, is very nearly eight heads high. The ‘Doryphorus’ at Naples not much more than seven. The ‘Choisseul Gouffier Apollo’ about seven and a half, etc. Vasari seems to have derived his curious mode of reckoning from Filarete, who in Book 1 of his Treatise on Architecture measures a man as follows: Head = 1 head, neck = ½, breast = 1, body = 2, thighs = 2, legs = 2, foot = ½, total nine heads. Alberti, Leonardo, Albrecht Dürer, and indeed almost all the older writers on art, discourse on the proportions of the human figure.