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Da Vinci is the one that’s credited with being the first to illustrate the ancient idea in a way that’s anatomically correct. While there’s no doubt that he did have unprecedented knowledge of human anatomy, we now think that he didn’t so much come up with the idea on his own but swiped it from one of his contemporaries.

Making man fit inside both shapes was, for a long time, a lot more complicated than we think of today. The original writings that specified what the image would look like also had a set of guidelines. For example, the man’s navel should be at the center of the image. People had tried and failed to produce the image as it was described, until da Vinci made the geometric shapes off-center.

It wasn’t his idea, though. Renaissance researcher Claudio Sgarbi has recently uncovered an earlier drawing by an architect named Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara that provides the answer to the pictographic riddle. Giacomo Andrea’s version of the drawing is full of corrections, as if he were messing about with the idea before hitting on the right answer. He and da Vinci knew each other, and we even know that they had dinner together around the time da Vinci drew his version.

We only have hints about who Giacomo Andrea really was, and he seems to be quite literally revolutionary. At the time, the French were occupying Milan. Da Vinci was on friendly terms with them, but Giacomo Andrea was, apparently, something of a guerrilla fighter against the occupiers. He was eventually arrested, hanged, quartered, and wiped from the history books. -- http://listverse.com/

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