On the Nazca Desert in southern Peru, there were patterns resembling animals, plants, and humans. The lines of these geoglyphs had once been believed to have been drawn by aliens, because modern people did not believe that ancient people before the Common Era had been capable of creating such precise and ingenious images.
Later, some believed that these enormous drawings had most likely been used to indicate the positions of the sun, moon, and stars. The lines of one drawing happened to lie where the sun set on the winter solstice, and similar painted patterns had appeared on ancient pottery found near the desert. Because the region was dry and received little rain, the enormous drawings had not eroded away.
On the land of North America, there was also a city unlike other cities, one that had not constantly renewed itself and had scarcely changed since it was built, even though most of its public buildings had been burned down in the War of 1812.
Vitruvius's book praised the order of the starry sky and held that when an architect designed a building, he should answer to a higher spirit, and that spirit would answer the human spirit. Many ancient buildings corresponded to the heavens. For example, the Pyramid of Khufu corresponded to Orion's "belt." This idea had not died with Ptolemy's cosmology.
A cross and the human body were, of course, different things, yet they were joined by the element of "proportion." Vitruvius believed that symmetry arose from the proper harmony of a building's details. In the human body, taking a part from the arm, foot, palm, finger, or any other small component was part of the nature of proportion.
Nature had not merely bestowed sensation upon humans, as it had upon animals, but had also armed their minds