omething fixed and
enduring to relate it to the human figure, if it be only a flight of
steps in which each one is the measure of a stride. In the Farnese,
the Riccardi, the Strozzi, and many another Italian palace, the stone
seat about the base gives scale to the building because the beholder
knows instinctively that the height of such a seat must have some
relation to the length of a man's leg. In the Pitti palace the
balustrade which crowns each story answers a similar purpose: it
stands in no intimate relation to the gigantic arches below, but is
of a height convenient for lounging elbows. The door to Giotto's
campanile reveals the true size of the tower as nothing else could,
because it is so evidently related to the human figure and not to the
great windows higher up in the shaft.

[Illustration 49: THE MEDIAEVAL METHOD OF DRAWING THE FIGURE]

The geometrical plane figures which play the most important part in
architectural proportion are the square, the circle and the triangle;
and the human figure is intimately related to these elementary forms.
If a man stand with heels together, and arms outstretched horizontally
in opposite directions, he will be inscribed, as it were, within a
square; and his arms will mark, with fair accuracy, the base of an
inverted equilateral triangle, the apex of which will touch the ground
at his feet. If the arms be extended upward at an angle, and the
legs correspondingly separated, the extremities will touch
the circumferences of a circle having its center in the navel
(Illustrations 45, 46).

[Illustration 50]

The figure has been variously analyzed with a view to establishing
numerical ratios between its parts (Illustrations 47, 48, 49). Some
of these are so simple and easily remembered that they have obtained
a certain popular currency; such as that the length of the hand equals
the length of the face; that the span of the horizontally extended
arms equals the height; and the well known rule that twice around
the wrist is once around the neck, and twice around the neck is once
around the waist. The Roman architect Vitruvius, writing in the age of
Augustus Caesar, formulated the important proportions of the statues
of classical antiquity, and except that he makes the head smaller than
the normal (as it should be in heroic statuary), the ratios which
he gives are those to which the ideally perfect male figure should
conform. Among the ancients the foot was probably the standar