Everybody knows the picture: a man meticulously rendered by Leonardo da<br> Vinci standing with arms and legs outstretched in a circle and a <br>square. Deployed today to celebrate subjects as various as the grandeur <br>of art the beauty of the human form and the universality of the human <br>spirit the drawing turns up just about everywhere: in books on coffee <br>cups on corporate logos even on spacecraft. It has in short become <br>the world's most famous cultural icon-and yet almost nobody knows about <br>the epic intellectual journeys that led to its creation. In this modest <br>drawing that would one day paper the world da Vinci attempted nothing <br>less than to calibrate the harmonies of the universe and understand the <br>central role man played in the cosmos.<br><br>Journalist and storyteller<br> Toby Lester brings <span style='font-style: italic;'>Vitruvian Man</span> to life resurrecting the ghost of an <br>unknown Leonardo. Populated by a colorful cast of characters including <br>Brunelleschi of the famous Dome <i>Da Vinci's Ghost</i> opens up a <br>surprising window onto the artist and philosopher himself and the <br>tumultuous intellectual and cultural transformations he bridged. With <br>sparkling prose Lester <br>captures the brief but momentous time in the history of western thought <br>when the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance art and science and <br>philosophy converged as one and all seemed to hold out the promise that<br> a single human mind if properly harnessed could grasp the nature of <br>everything.
