The cube has edge H (the figure’s height, equal to the arm span) and rests on the ground; its volumetric center falls at H/2 — the pubis, exactly where the square’s center falls in Leonardo’s drawing. The sphere is centered on the body’s vertical axis at the navel, with radius equal to the navel’s own height, which preserves Leonardo’s tangency in three dimensions: the sphere touches the ground plane at a single point, directly beneath the standing figure’s feet. The figure follows the classical canon of eight heads: the head is H/8 tall, its crown touching the cube’s top face, the shoulders just outside the hips at their anatomical stations.
Taking the navel at the golden section of the height (H/φ ≈ 0.618H — the traditional reading, adopted here as a design choice), the construction cascades in powers of φ: the sphere’s radius is φ−1H; it overtops the cube by exactly φ−3H; and it pierces the cube’s top face in a circle of radius φ−3/2H. The sphere bulges through all five upper faces of the cube, yet all eight corners remain outside it — the sphere blooms through the cube without ever swallowing its frame.
All ten Sephiroth stand at their anatomical stations from the Corpus’s own correspondence. Kether has risen just above the cube, its white sphere tangent to the top face from above, the Monad bearing its black point beyond the boundary; Chokmah and Binah ride up with it to the inner ears at the head’s mid-height, and the three Supernals remain an exact equilateral triangle — solved with its base on the head’s surface, then lifted whole until Kether cleared the cube. Chesed and Geburah hold the shoulders, Tiphareth the heart below them on the spine, Netzach and Hod the hips, Yesod the lower dantien below the hips, and Malkuth is now a quartered sphere at the tangency beneath the feet, its four longitudinal quarters bearing the traditional citrine, olive, black, and russet — citrine before the figure and proceeding clockwise as he would see it looking down.
The twenty-six paths now join the stations upon the body, each in its own color taken directly from the Vitruvian Soul’s path layers: the twenty-two standard paths as solid lines — the middle pillar descending from Kether through the head to the heart, then to Yesod, then to Malkuth beneath the feet — and the four river paths as bold dashed diagonals crossing the trunk: Will, Knowledge, Courage, and Silence, bearing the CEQ letters E, H, M, and P. The Sephiroth overlay their endpoints, so every path runs station to station exactly as on the flat Tree, here carried on the standing figure itself.
The passage from square to cube that these paths make is also an arithmetical event. By Fermat’s Sandwich Theorem, 26 is the only number in all of infinity standing one above a perfect square and one below a perfect cube: 25, 26, 27 — the pentad squared beneath, the triad cubed above. The figure enacts the very pair: below, the five-pointed body upon the Vitruvian square; above, the Supernal triad raised over the cube; between them, the twenty-six paths at the one station arithmetic reserves for them. And with the ten Sephiroth the paths complete thirty-six — the square of the perfect six and the triangle of the eight-head canon by which the body itself is drawn.
The four rings where the sphere breaks through the cube’s walls are colored from the figure’s own orientation: yellow before him, red at his right hand, blue behind him, black at his left — the classical elemental stations of the quarters, Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. Each ring now bears its own pentagram, point-up and matching its color, inscribed within the circle on the face of the cube — the star drawn at each watchtower. The fifth, golden ring above at the crown’s face remains unmarked.
The five-pointed star of the two-dimensional diagram is inscribed here, point-up, on the sphere’s frontal great circle — the same circle the flat drawing shows, centered with the sphere at the navel and tangent to the ground beneath the feet. Seen from the front it is the familiar figure; seen from anywhere else it stands as a plane of five silver chords within the sphere, turning with the body rather than floating before it.
Six white Calvary crosses, each ringed at its crossing, stand in the sphere’s own tangent planes: one flat at the summit and one flat at the tangency below, appearing true to the figure looking up or down, and four at the diagonal stations of the equator — at forty-five degrees between the quarter rings, where the sphere reaches nearest the cube’s vertical edges — each facing outward into its corner, appearing true to the figure looking into it. The cross below holds the quartered Malkuth sphere at its very center: the rose at the heart of the cross.
In two dimensions Leonardo overlays poses; in three, the figure rotates about its own vertical axis through the center of gravity. The standing T-pose touches five of the cube’s six faces, and spinning, its fingertips sweep a cylinder tangent to all four walls. The spread figure’s raised fingertips and spread toes each lie exactly on the sphere, and spinning, they sweep two latitude circles upon it. The two-dimensional figure squares the circle through the body; the three-dimensional figure cubes the sphere — impossible by construction, achieved by mediation.