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Da Vinci's ghost : genius, obsession, and how Leonardo created the world in his own image

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  • Author: Lester, Toby
    Contributor: Tantor Media; Hoye, Stephen
    Edition: Unabridged
    Date:
    Created
    2015
    ,
    Copyrighted
    2012
    Summary:

    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 world's most famous cultural icon-and 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 Vinci's Ghost opens up a surprising window onto the artist and philosopher himself and the tumultuous intellectual and cultural transformations he bridged. With sparkling prose, 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.

    Subject(s): ART / General | Art
    Original Publisher: Old Saybrook, Conn, [Prince Frederick, Md.], Tantor Media, [Distributed by] OneClick Digital
    Language(s): English
    ISBN: 9781452625362