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Shop nowDa Vinci's Ghost
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Learn moreEverybody 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.
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.
Stephen Hoye has won thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards and two prestigious APA Audie Awards, including one for the New York Times bestseller Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki. A graduate of London's Guildhall and a veteran of London's West End, Stephen has recorded many other notable titles, such as Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong and The Google Story by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed.