Toby Lester

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.

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