A suggestion from Peter Panton, owner of Panton’s English Bookshop, a favourite haunt of international book lovers in Milan.

Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image – by Toby Lester

Everyone knows the image. No one knows its history.
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. In telling its story, Toby Lester weaves together a centuryspanning saga of people and ideas. “Da Vinci’s Ghost” is written with the same narrative flair and intellectual sweep as Lester’s award-winning first book, the “almost unbearably thrilling” (Simon Winchester) Fourth Part of the World. Like Vitruvian Man itself, the book captures a pivotal time in the history of Western thought when the Middle Ages was giving way to the Renaissance, when art and science and philosophy all seemed to be converging as one, and when it seemed just possible, at least to Leonardo da Vinci, that a single human being might embody—and even understand—the nature of everything.

Now available at Panton’s English Bookshop.
www.panton.it
Via L. Ariosto corner of via L. Mascheroni
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