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Your prices reflect a sale price of 50% off
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5 Audio CDs
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List Price: $34.99
Your price: $17.50
EAN: 9781452605364
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1 Mp3-CD
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List Price: $24.99
Your price: $12.50
EAN: 9781452655369
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Audio Download
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Available at
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Publication Date: 02/07/2012
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Running Time: 6 hrs 30 min
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Synopsis
Author Toby Lester cracks open Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man in order to explore the cultural explosion of Renaissance Europe.
Summary
Review Excerpts
"It’s an exciting ride, for which narrator Stephen Hoye is well suited. He reads rather like a newscaster, lifting the ends of sentences and sounding upbeat, as if he’s on the scene. Just right for a report from the end of one world and the start of another." ---AudioFile
"Narrator Stephen Hoye does a credible job of bringing this exciting historical period to life." ---Library Journal Audio Review
"Lester braids intellectual threads---philosophy, anatomy, architecture, and art---together in a way that reaffirms not only Leonardo's genius but also re-establishes the significance of historical context in understanding great works of art." ---Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"Every once in a while that rare book comes along that is not only wonderfully written and utterly compelling but also alters the way you perceive the world. . . . Like a detective, Lester uncovers the secrets of an iconic drawing and pieces together a magisterial history of art and ideas and beauty." ---David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z
"Da Vinci's Ghost is both a beautiful and a brilliant book." ---Howard Markel, author of An Anatomy of Addiction
Everybody knows the picture: a man, meticulously rendered by Leonardo da
Vinci, standing with arms and legs outstretched in a circle and a
square. Deployed today to celebrate subjects as various as the grandeur
of art, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human
spirit, the drawing turns up just about everywhere: in books, on coffee
cups, on corporate logos, even on spacecraft. It has, in short, become
the world's most famous cultural icon—and yet almost nobody knows about
the epic intellectual journeys that led to its creation. In this modest
drawing that would one day paper the world, da Vinci attempted nothing
less than to calibrate the harmonies of the universe and understand the
central role man played in the cosmos.
Journalist and storyteller
Toby Lester brings Vitruvian Man to life, resurrecting the ghost of an
unknown Leonardo. Populated by a colorful cast of characters, including
Brunelleschi of the famous Dome, Da Vinci's Ghost opens up a
surprising window onto the artist and philosopher himself and the
tumultuous intellectual and cultural transformations he bridged. With
sparkling prose, Lester
captures the brief but momentous time in the history of western thought
when the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, art and science and
philosophy converged as one, and all seemed to hold out the promise that
a single human mind, if properly harnessed, could grasp the nature of
everything.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY › Artists, Architects, Photographers
ART › Individual Artist
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY › General
HISTORY › Renaissance
ART › General
ART › Drawing
ART › History › General
HISTORY › General
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Publishers Weekly  Review
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 "Da Vinci's Ghost")