As much as we distract ourselves with the mundane pursuits of work and play, shelter and sex, the search for meaning is a siren's song inside all of us, driving us to seek out the universal truths that underpin our lives and the universe that encapsulates us. How is it structured? What are its organizing principles? What, or who, created it? Is humanity nothing more than a random outcome of evolution, or are we a purposeful result of something more aware,more divine? In some of us, these questions are only flirted with during times of intense self-reflection. In others, however, they catalyze the mind, compelling it to travel down roads to self-discovery that have the power to change the world. Few men produced so much from this marriage of drive and introspection than Leonardo Da Vinci. And few of his ideas and drawings have had as much symbolic power as Vitruvian Man.
Reproduced in textbooks and stamps, paintings and poems, Vitruvian Man is both the culmination of a thought experiment and the representation of the intersection of man, his world and the universe that houses them both. First theorized by the Roman General Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture, the image -- a man fit within a circle within a square -- is the illustration of the idea that man, specifically the properly portioned man, is the universe writ small, a microcosm of the world he inhabits. In his organs and his dimensions, his aptitudes and his limitations, are the blueprints upon which all else is built. For like everything else in the world, he is subject to proportions, proportions that can be reduced to mathematics, mathematics that govern the design of every godly organism.
Though Vitruvius conceived of this homo-centric notion 1,500 years before Leonardo Da Vinci's birth, it took this giant of the Renaissance to actualize the thought experiment, to prove at least that man could fit inside a circle inside a square. Of course, not even Leonardo was able to prove the philosophical implications of this discovery. Answers to these mysteries, if available, lie many years ahead in our turbulent future.
Da Vinci's Ghost is a charming and concise examination of Vitruvian Man and the master who gave him form. Despite spending the majority of his time here meandering through any of a number of historical digressions, Mr. Lester engagingly establishes the background to both Vitruvian Man and the ideas and biases that dominated the world that spawned him. And so, when the author is finally ready to confront the thought experiment head on, the reader is well-armed with the context necessary to fully comprehend the philosophical implications of just such a notion. For to fit man within a circle, representing the perfect celestial form, and a square, representing the building blocks of the world around him, is to position man within a universal continuum. It is to conceive of him being either the perfect form upon which all else is modeled, or simply one more iteration of a design fundamental to the universe. It is to marry man to both the cosmos above his head and the earth beneath his feet, a relationship that forever embeds him in the grand scheme of life.
Mr. Lester could have taken more time here. For as thorough as he is with the lead-up to Leonardo's sketching of Vitruvian Man, his account of its impact upon the world ends rather abruptly thereafter, leaving his readers only to muse at the myriad ways in which this notion has intrigued and shaped the thoughts of philosophers and mathematicians alike. However, in every other respect, this is wonderful and compelling history, precisely that kind of narrative non-fiction that excites the mind with the tantalizing mysteries of an unknowable universe.
Imaginative work... (3/5 Stars)
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