CONCLUSION: VITRUVIAN MAN AND VIRTUOUS WOMAN A RETROSPECTIVE ON THE HOMO BENE FIGURATUS THROUGH LEONARDO DA VINCI AND HARMONIA ROSALES

On September 16, 2017, the then-thirty-three-year-old Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales presented her oil painting Virtuous Woman at her first art gallery exhibition, called 'Black Imaginary To Counter Hegemony (B.I.T.C.H.)', at the Simard Bilodeau Contemporary in downtown Los Angeles. The work is based on Leonardo da Vinci's famous visualization of Vitruvius' description of the homo bene figuratus, that is, of the 'ideal' or 'well-formed' human being on whose symmetry and proportions the construction of temples should be modeled (Vitr. De arch. 3.1; fig. 5.3). Rosales retains the presentation of a nude human figure in an interlocking square and circle on a background covered in handwriting. Yet Rosales' rendition of the lettering is even less easily legible than the Italian paraphrases of, and expansions upon, Vitruvius' Latin that the left-handed Leonardo had written in mirrored script around his sketch. Moreover, Rosales' painting fills not the page of a book, but a large canvas damaged at the edges and marked by red-orange blemishes. Most importantly, the person at the center is no longer the stern and, to a modern viewer, White-presenting man of da Vincian fame. Instead, she is a Black woman (fig. 7.1).