num_pages: 277
description: Toby Lesterthe award-winning author of The Fourth Part of the World celebrated by Simon Winchester as a rare and masterly talenttakes on one of the great untold stories in the history of ideas: the genesis of Leonardo da Vincis Vitruvian Man.Everybody knows the picture: a man meticulously rendered by Leonardo da Vinci standing with arms and legs outstretched in a circle and a square. Deployed today to celebrate subjects as various as the grandeur of art the beauty of the human form and the universality of the human spirit the drawing turns up just about everywhere: in books on coffee cups on corporate logos even on spacecraft. It has in short become the worlds most famous cultural iconand yet almost nobody knows about the epic intellectual journeys that led to its creation. In this modest drawing that would one day paper the world da Vinci attempted nothing less than to calibrate the harmonies of the universe and understand the central role man played in the cosmos.Journalist and storyteller Toby Lester brings Vitruvian Man to life resurrecting the ghost of an unknown Leonardo. Populated by a colorful cast of characters including Brunelleschi of the famous Dome Da Vincis Ghost opens up a surprising window onto the artist and philosopher himself and the tumultuous intellectual and cultural transformations he bridged. With sparkling prose and a rich variety of original illustrations Lester captures the brief but momentous time in the history of western thought when the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance art and science and philosophy converged as one and all seemed to hold out the promise that a single human mind if properly harnessed could grasp the nature of everything.
language: English
title: Da Vinci's Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image
publisher: Free Press