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

(Free Press, $27)

Few drawings are as instantly recognizable as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. The image, of a nude man whose arms and legs stretch out to touch the edges of a square and a circle, pops up everywhere, from the one-euro coin to The Simpsons. Toby Lester’s “fairly speculative” new book creates an engrossing story by tracking the drawing’s philosophical origins. Leonardo was, at the simplest level, creating an illustration for a 1,500-year-old Roman book that argued that the proportions of a building should be derived from those of a well-proportioned man. But the drawing is perhaps “the most beautiful and triumphant expression” of the idea, at least as old as Plato, that man deserves to consider himself the measure of all things.

The “real star” of Lester’s account isn’t that intriguing central idea, said John Wilwol in the San Francisco Chronicle. The book’s Leonardo is fully alive, and “readers will feel an instant, easy connection” to the eccentric artist. The painter of the Mona Lisa, we learn, loved jokes and party tricks, practiced vegetarianism, and was too bad with deadlines to hold a steady job. Yet he was also endlessly curious. Lester speculates that Leonardo created Vitruvian Man in 1490, at age 38, shortly after an acquaintance handed him a copy of an obscure book by the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius. The drawing marked, in the author’s phrase, a “hinge moment” in the rise of Enlightenment thought.

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Not that Enlightenment thinkers knew about the drawing, said Richard Eder in The Boston Globe. The image sat in private collections for centuries, and wasn’t widely disseminated until art historian Kenneth Clark reproduced it in a best-selling 1956 book. Lester works a bit too hard to make the drawing seem central to Leonardo’s worldview, and Ghost’s chronicle of the “man-as-measure theme” across human history is “cloudily written.” Still, the book deserves to be read. Its “graceful account” of Leonardo’s early life is alone worth the price of admission.