The mystery of the Da Vinci code has been cracked!
No, not that one from the Dan Brown book which says Jesus had a secret wife who was actually the Holy Grail, or however that went.
The true Da Vinci code is contained within the Italian polymath's famous 'Vitruvian Man' illustration of the human body, that one where he's got two sets of arms and legs and you can see his meat and two veg flopping out.
In the drawing, the Vitruvian Man is depicted within both a circle and a square, and a dentist believes he's worked out something very important about the whole thing which proves that Leonardo Da Vinci understood something hundreds of years before everyone else cottoned on.
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The dentist in question, Dr Rory Mac Sweeney, has published a study in which he explains that there's more to Da Vinci's famous illustration than we all initially thought.
In Da Vinci's own notes just above the illustration, the Italian genius writes: "If you open your legs enough that your head is lowered by one-fourteenth of your height and raise your hands enough that your extended fingers touch the line of the top of your head, know that the centre of the extended limbs will be the navel, and the space between the legs will be an equilateral triangle."
The answer really was hidden in plain sight all this time, as Da Vinci literally wrote it down for us.
According to the dentist, if you start from the Vitruvian Man's belly button and trace a line down to where his outer feet (for lack of a better term) meet the circle, then you get an equilateral triangle.
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However, it's the dimensions of this triangle which are apparently so important as Dr Mac Sweeney says it has a tetrahedral ratio of 1.64-1.65, which is incredibly close to the ratio of 1.633, which basically makes the perfect triangle for a structure.
The dentist reckons this means Leonardo Da Vinci drew Vitrivian Man with 'sophisticated geometric understanding rather than arbitrary artistic choices'.
Basically, Da Vinci figured out the perfect shapes centuries before anyone else did, or cared to write them down in documents which have survived long enough to end up on the internet.
These perfect triangles are used in everything from human anatomy to building construction and even in stacking items in the supermarket.
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Even if Da Vinci's considerable intellect would have been wasted as a shelf stacker, this appears to be evidence that he'd do a damn good job of it.
Da Vinci's true code, it seems, is that the human body and its design 'reflects universal mathematical principles' making the Vitruvian Man a work of science as well as art.
It's perhaps no surprise that it took a dentist to crack the mystery considering this perfect triangle can be found in the jawbone of the human body thanks to something called the Bonwill Triangle, which was discovered in the 19th Century.
Just know that Da Vinci got there first.
Topics: Art, Science, History, Conspiracy Theory
Joe Harker