Da Vinci's Ghost

Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image

Toby Lester

2/2012
2012. 304 p.


EUR 21,95  in den Warenkorb

This is the story of Vitruvian Man: Leonardo da Vinci¿s famous drawing of a man in a circle and a square. Deployed today to celebrate subjects as various as the nature of genius, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human spirit, the figure appears on everything from coffee cups and T-shirts to book covers and corporate logos. In short, it has become the world¿s most famous cultural icon, yet almost nobody knows anything about it.
Leonardo didn¿t summon Vitruvian Man out of thin air. He was playing with the idea, set down by the Roman architect Vitruvius, that the human body could be made to fit inside a circle, long associated with the divine, and a square, related to the earthly and secular. To place a man inside those shapes was therefore to imply that the human body was the world in miniature. This idea, known as the theory of the microcosm, was the engine that had powered Western religious and scientific thought for centuries, and Leonardo hitched himself to it in no uncertain terms. Yet starting in the 1480s he set out to do something unprecedented. If the design of the body truly did reflect that of the cosmos, he reasoned, then by studying its proportions and anatomy more thoroughly than had ever been done before - by peering deep into both body and soul-he might broaden the scope of his art to include the broadest of metaphysical horizons. He might, in other words, obtain an almost godlike perspective on the makeup of the world as a whole

Toby Lester lebt in Boston und schreibt für die Zeitschrift The Atlantic.

Titel zum Thema:
Englische Bücher / Kunst, Architektur, Fotografie  Leonardo Da Vinci  Leonardo Da Vinci; Biografien/Erinnerungen  Renaissance, Kunst