This article examines the aesthetic understanding of the UNOVIS (New Artists) group, which was formed around Kasimir Severinovich Malevich’s work The Black Square, by relating it to the reference made to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, featured in the group’s emblem. During the Renaissance, the Vitruvian Man was the symbol of proportional perfection and the anthropocentric cosmos that placed the human body at the centre of the universe; by contrast, the suprematist ideology adopted by UNOVIS eliminated the human figure and replaced it with absolute forms and geometric purity. This transformation represents a move away from the human-centred conception of art and a quest to reach a universal order through formal purity. This representation is not only an aesthetic rupture but also a historical evolution of the idea of universal order. Within this framework, the study interprets the symbolic opposition between Malevich and da Vinci as a transition representing art’s turn towards pure form and thought as the human retreats from the centre; the UNOVIS members, a product of the Russian avant-garde initiative, are examined as representatives of this transition. Thus, the work offers an inquiry into the metaphysical and ontological foundations of modern art along the line extending from the anthropometric ideal of the Renaissance to the formal universality of Suprematism. Ultimately, the aesthetic dialogue between the Black Square and the Vitruvian Man reveals a new artistic worldview in which the human-centred order is replaced by a form-centred universality.
Keywords: Black Square, Suprematism, Universal Form, Modern Art, Abstraction, Pure Form, Form and Proportion.