The Annunciation

Leonardo da Vinci, The Annunciation, ca. 1472-75. Oil and tempera on panel, 98 cm x 217 cm. Uffizi Gallery, Florence.  

Leonardo da Vinci is one of the quintessential Golden Ratio artists in the popular imagination. The Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) immediately comes to mind, and Mona Lisa (1503-06) has been overlaid with all manner of golden rectangles and Fibonacci spirals. Leonardo illustrated Luca Pacioli's treatise on the Golden Ratio, De Divina Proportione, around 1497 (the book was finally published in 1509). Is it possible that he knew of this ratio's existence before his collaboration with Pacioli? He could have encountered it through Euclid's The Elements (Stoichia), to which Leonardo's contemporary Piero della Francesca looked when he wrote his own treatise On Perspective. (Pacioli, who was a pupil of Della Francesca, borrowed, perhaps plagiarized, several ideas from his teacher's work for his own book.)

Marco Livio, generally a skeptic in regards to the Golden Ratio's role in art, writes that Leonardo's drawing of the head of an old man demonstrates his interest in grid patterning to determine proportions, and concludes that the artist might have considered the application of the Golden Ratio to his art (Livio 165).

The Annunciation (c. 1472-75) is a convincing example because of the significance behind the lines that delineate the golden ratio, the most important of which is the vertical that overlaps the corner of the Virgin Mary's olive green residence, separating her space from that of the angel Gabriel. What is the significance of the other Golden Ratio lines in this early Leonardo composition?