Everybody kws 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 body kws about the epic intellectual journeys that led to its creation. In this modest drawing that would one day paper the world, da Vinci attempted thing 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 unkwn 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.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Tantor Media, Inc
ISBN-10
145260536x
ISBN-13
9781452605364
eBay Product ID (ePID)
111560240
Product Key Features
Author
Toby Lester
Format
CD-Audio, CD Standard Audio Format
Language
English
Topic
Biography: Historical, Political & Military
Additional Product Features
Place of Publication
Old Saybrook, Ct
Running Time
390
Narrator(s)
Stephen Hoye
Author Biography
Toby Lester is the author of The Fourth Part of the World and a contributing editor for the Atlantic. Stephen Hoye has won more than a dozen AudioFile Earphones Awards and two prestigious APA Audie Awards, including one for Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki. He 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.