Da Vinci Vitruvian Man Highlights Arctic Ice Loss

Artist John Quigley has travelled to the Arctic sea ice and drawn Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous sketch the ‘Vitruvian Man’ onto the Arctic Ice as a way to show what humans have done to the planet.

“We came here to create the ‘Melting Vitruvian Man’, after Da Vinci’s famous sketch of the human body, because climate change is literally eating into the body of our civilisation,” said Quigley. “When he did this sketch it was the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the dawn of this innovative age that continues to this day, but our use of fossil fuels is threatening that.”

Quigley, an specialist in aerial art, travelled on board a Greenpeace ice breaker to a point some 800 kilometres from the North Pole to draw what he has entitled the “Melting Vitruvian Man.”

The piece of art measures the equivalent of four Olympic-size swimming pools, even though the whole piece has not been recreated, with two arms and a leg missing, having ‘melted’ into the ice.

Source: Greenpeace
Image Source: Nick Cobbing / Greenpeace

1 thought on “Da Vinci Vitruvian Man Highlights Arctic Ice Loss”

  1. Way cool…great example of enviro-art that actually says something, has a point to make.

    AS an artist, I am usually on the look out for large-scale art works that provide a degree of consciousness raising.

    Nice find and thanks for covering this!

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