The Zodiac Man or homo signorum was used in anatomical diagrams dating from ancient times to the later medieval period.
The human body was believed to be linked to the heavens during this period. This was often illustrated with the Zodiac Man, who had every part of his body linked with an astrological sign. The astrological sign was linked to humourism alongside the weather. As well as the Zodiac man being intimately linked with heaven it was also the common drawing of the human body at the time.
Famous quotes containing the words zodiac and/or man:
“We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)