Archive - March 30, 2012

Here is a quick summary of  Toby Lester’s (Yeman 1983–85) new book Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image that has already been published, to great reviews, in England, and is now available in the U.S. 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 . . .