DEFICIENCY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION: LACKING THE VITRUVIAN MAN

Vitruvius is a full-figured text. Bodies proliferate endlessly - as touchstones of measurement, as images of ideal proportions, as analogies for building, empire, discipline, or text - and they dance just as deftly around the scholarship. If we had to pick a metaphor by which Vitruvius lived in writing, we could do no better than corpus. He is perhaps antiquity's greatest embodiment of body. But what I would like to argue in this article is that the Vitruvian body is not uniform; not alone; not ideal; and as an instrument of scientific discovery, it is not enough. It is lacking - and it needs to lack.