nothing expresses the spirit of humanism in drawing like this sketch of leonardo da vinci.
man is at the center. why inside a circle and a square?
squaring the circle is a mathematical impossibility posed as a problem by ancient geometers (see this).
da vinci proposes that humanity breaches the apparent contradiction between the two. a human is the paragon of physical measurement.
renaissance humanism affected the cultural, political, social, and literary landscape of europe. beginning in florence in the last decades of the 14th century, humanism revived the study of science, philosophy, art and poetry of classical antiquity.