Da Vinci's Ghost: The untold story of Vitruvian Man [Hardcover]

It seems very fashionable to have the words 'Da Vinci ........' as a book title these days...

And Dan Brown, as long as you live, you will always have so much to answer for...

But, don't be put off by the apparently clichéd title of this little gem. For this is Toby Lester... and this is his second non-fiction book.

The 'Fourth Part of the World', his first book, for those who are in the know, is quite simply a work of brilliance. Witty, erudite and drenched in serious historical fact, it's slow-burning rise to five-star and must-read status remains the mark of a first-time writer filled with passion, honesty and the desire to put the traditionally academic (i.e boring) historians to shame. It was, and remains, a superb and magnificent debut.

To 'Da Vinci's Ghost' then. And it is, in essence, 270+ pages deconstructing Da Vinci's most iconic image ...'Vitruvian Man'. A grand tour from the earliest Roman origins, through the 'Middle Ages' to the 'Renaissance' and in all its permutations, here-in lies the centuries long journey of the image we all have taken for granted, but have never asked (beyond da Vinci's drawing) where it really came from.

Utterly devoid of padding, historical waffle and 'wikipedia' by-the-numbers cut-and-paste, this is an exceptional second helping from a writer who is truly getting into his stride.

Beautifully researched, written and edited ... and well illustrated too ... Lester has created a quality slice of historical non-fiction. Bravo.

You will know this drawing as well as you know the Mona Lisa: it's Vitruvian Man, standing inside his circle and his square with his four arms and four legs spread wide (`...the guy doing naked jumping jacks...'); but possibly, like me, you've never thought much about its pedigree. That it should have a book-long history, so riveting that when you've read it on the train it burns a hole in your bag; well, that really is the world's most famous drawing.
This is an extraordinarily interesting and exciting book. Toby Lester has spun a containing circle of his own, from his progressive researches, and from a journey made by Leonardo with the architect Giorgio Martini which probably sparked the production of the drawing. Overlaying this circle is the straight panel of history, leading from Vitruvius himself into the afterlife of Leonardo's fragile drawing, whisked about from owner to owner until acquired by the Accademia, Venice; and there in the midst of everything is Leonardo, staring at himself with sufficient intensity to transcribe his soul.
Within this diagrammatic structure whole worlds of scientific and philosophical exploration are crammed, and Lester, with his fluidly readable prose, enthusiasm, and tenacious digging after facts, is the ideal master to unpack it for us. He starts with the spiritual schema of the Lambeth Map (c.1300), with Christ standing in a square, embracing the circle of the globe; and the pagan geometry of the Roman architect Vitruvius, who saw `the proportions of ... temples [conforming] to the proportions of the ideal human body... [which] conformed to the hidden geometry of the universe'. Vitruvius was architect to the emperor Augustus, who sent his engineers marching across Europe to build `a perfect body of empire... controlled by a single head of state'; and in his Ten Books on Architecture (mid-20s BC), Vitruvius drew continual analogies between the human body, architectural proportion and the cosmos, and the defining geometrical elements of all three were the square and the circle.
The Ten Books disappeared into the whirlpool of history, re-emerging in the 8th century, when the demi-god Augustus had been replaced by the Son of God, `the head of the body, the church'. Christ became the metaphor for both micro- and macro- cosm, whilst scientific thought saw the anatomy of the body and the geography of the world as reflections of each other. These interlocking modes of thought with which Leonardo grew up were ideally adapted to stimulate his multifarious interests in natural phenomena, engineering, building and physical anatomy. He befriended the architect Bramante, with whom he discussed Vitruvius's ideas, as well as Francesco di Giorgio Martini, whose Treatise... was a contemporary, part-illustrated answer to the Ten Books.
While he pondered a way to raise the vast putative dome of Milan's cathedral, Leonardo prepared his own treatise, On the Human Body, measuring the relative proportions of every part, and attempting to locate the seat of the soul; he may also have worked with his friend Giacomo Andrea on a fully-illustrated version of the Ten Books. Out of this cauldron of ideas drifts a sheet of paper, slightly larger than A4, on which Leonardo has brought to life Vitruvius's description of the ideally-proportioned man, his navel at the centre of the circle which touches his outstretched fingers and toes, while a square with a different centre defines his armspan and height. This creative decentring simultaneously harmonizes both real and ideal anatomies, and both geometrical figures. At the same time, concentration has rendered the Man as `a kind of metaphysical self-portrait... a universal self-portrait... his ghost... unforgettably alive'. Compulsively readable.