Da Vinci's Ghost

Everybody recognizes the Vitruvian Man, meticulously rendered by Leonardo da Vinci, standing with arms and legs outstretched in a circle and a square. Used today to celebrate subjects as various as the grandeur of art, the nature of well-being, 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 and the Italian one-euro coin. 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, Leonardo attempted nothing less than to calibrate the harmonies of the universe and understand the central role man played in the cosmos. With Da Vinci’s Ghost, Toby Lester, the award-winning author of The Fourth Part of the World, takes on one of the great untold stories in the history of ideas.

Art historians call it Vitruvian Man because it is based on a description of human proportions written some two thousand years ago by the Roman architect Vitruvius. Describing man’s figure in an architectural context, Vitruvius proposed that sacred temples should conform to the proportions of the human body, which he believed conformed to the hidden geometry of the universe. Fifteen hundred years later, Leonardo embraced this idea, believing that it might help him expand the scope of his art and understand the world as a whole. For Leonardo, Vitruvian Man was a visual representation of the notion that we might be able to glimpse our place in the grand scheme of things.

Lester tells two stories. The first, of how Leonardo came to draw his famous picture, opens up a surprising window onto the artist and philosopher himself and the tumultuous intellectual and cultural transformations he bridged. The other is of how Vitruvian Man came into being as an idea. Spanning centuries, continents and disciplines, it encompasses theories of the cosmos, ancient Greek sculpture, land-surveying techniques, the idea of empire, early Christian geometrical symbolism, Europe’s great cathedrals, Islamic ideas of the microcosm, the humanists of Italy and much more. The two stories intersect, of course—and eventually converge on the single, powerful image at the book’s center.

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.