Da Vincis Ghost, Toby Lester
Da Vincis Ghost, Toby Lester
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Da Vinci's Ghost
Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image

Author: Toby Lester

Narrator: Stephen Hoye

Unabridged: 6 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/07/2012


Synopsis

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.

About Toby Lester

Toby Lester is the author of the Barnes & Noble Discover Award finalist The Fourth Part of the World. He is a contributing editor to and has written extensively for the Atlantic, and his work has been featured on the radio show This American Life. He is an invited research scholar at Brown University's John Carter Brown Library and a former Peace Corps volunteer and United Nations observer. Toby lives in the Boston area with his wife and three daughters.


Reviews

Goodreads review by J.R. on January 03, 2013

Few mortals have captured the imagination of so many as has Leonardo Da Vinci. We tend to see him as the ultimate genius of the Renaissance period. Yet, as Toby Lester reminds us here, he was a man of remarkable imagination who was self-educated, unable to retain full-time employment because he faile......more

Goodreads review by Jonathan on February 07, 2012

Albert Einstein wrote that the mind “always has tried to form for itself a simple and synoptic image of the surrounding world.” During the Renaissance, when the ancient Greek idea of man as the measure of all things leapt to the forefront of intellectual life, the human body became a preferred objec......more

Goodreads review by Fred on September 07, 2014

You may not have known it was called the "Vitruvian Man" but you are doubtless familiar with the Da Vinci's drawing of the man with the intense stare in the circle and square - reproduced in posters, T-shirts, mugs, etc. This is the story of that drawing, inspired by architect Vitruvius, who proceed......more

Goodreads review by Yasmin on July 01, 2015

A remarkable book for its research and detail. I actually didn't realise there were differing ideas as to what Da Vinci's Created Man really was/is. To me I thought it was Da Vinci capturing man in motion, or rather the upper and lower limbs as the torso keeps in the same position. But there is so m......more

Goodreads review by Ray on February 21, 2012

Apparently Da Vinci’s most famous drawing, Vitruvian Man, was an idea that was well known and employed by architects and artists during the Renaissance. Historian Toby Lester does a solid job of tracing the origin and application of the Platonic ideal of man prior to Da Vinci’s rendering of him. Thi......more