JOHN DONVAN: Now let's talk about an image, an image that is a little over 500 years old. It is a drawing, and we practically guarantee that you have seen this image. Does it ring a bell? It is by Leonardo Da Vinci, and it is a drawing of a nude male figure who stands inside a circle within a square. And if you aren't sure what we're talking about, you can find it on our website. The drawing actually has a name, and it's called "Vitruvian Man." And it is the subject of a new book called "Da Vinci's Ghost" by Toby Lester. Very well reviewed book and much discussed. And it tells the tale of how this drawing came to be and the theories that inspired its creation. But it is also a tale about the man behind the image in some ways that the story hasn't been told before, Leonardo Da Vinci, who was adamant about creating an image of the perfectly proportioned man. And in "Da Vinci's Ghost" we learn not only about Da Vinci's drive to create the drawing but also how the image and Da Vinci himself inspired thought about man's role in the universe. So this is the image that sometimes people refer to as the guy doing jumping jacks inside the circle and the square. What would you like to know about Da Vinci and about "Vitruvian Man"? Our number is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. So Toby Lester is the author of this new book, "Da Vinci's Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Image." He is also contributing editor for The Atlantic magazine and joins us now from member station WBUR in Boston. Toby, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION. Hi.
TOBY LESTER: Thanks for having me.
DONVAN: I've been guided by your wisdom ahead of time not to refer to Leonardo Da Vinci as Da Vinci, as so many of us do, and that you, in the book and throughout this conversation, will refer to him as Leonardo and that in that there's a little piece of information, which is what?
LESTER: Well, lots of people do call him Da Vinci, and I'm actually not too opposed to it, but there are plenty of purists out there who will say that Da Vinci just means from Vinci, and this figure named Leonardo was born in the town of Vinci and that's all that's telling you. So it's -- to the purest ear, it sounds very peculiar, but I don't mind it so much. So I'm happy to go whichever way you want.(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DONVAN: All right. Just not Leo. So you actually write, I would say, actually almost a biography of an image and then a biography of the man who made the image. But I've described the image. I'm hoping that people know the one we're talking about. And again, you can run to our website and see it, talk@npr.org - or at npr.org, TALK OF THE NATION. But "Vitruvian Man," the name itself has a story, and it tell us why Leonardo didn't exactly come up with the concept himself. So what is the story of "Vitruvian Man"?
LESTER: Well, the name is a tipoff. Vitruvian derives from the name of a Roman architect called Vitruvius, who wrote and worked in the 1st century BC and who, in a book of his on architecture, described the ideal proportions of the human figure and then said that the human figure, in this kind of ideal form, could be made to fit inside a circle and could be made to fit inside a square. And it's that idea that Leonardo, in his picture, is trying to capture visually. And in fact, the picture has writing on it, and the writing lays out some of those proportions that Leonardo then puts into visual form in his picture.
DONVAN: And - go ahead.
LESTER: No, no. Go ahead.
DONVAN: And what's so interesting also is that Vitruvius was writing about architecture, and he was talking about the need - as I read your book, he was talking about his desire to create architecture that touched a universal form, and the suggestion was that this universal form that should be represented in buildings was actually embodied in the human body. Do I have that right?
LESTER: You're exactly right. Yeah, I mean the idea was that - there had been long this idea of the microcosm, the idea that the human body was a kind of miniature model of the universe as a whole. And if you could study and obtain the kind of blueprint of a universal design that was in display on the human body, then you could understand all sorts of things about the universe. And as a working architect, obviously, if you could kind of latch on to the design principles that made both the human body and the universe perfect, then you could align your buildings with human life and with the kind of cosmic function of everything.
DONVAN: So this idea was so captivating that you write that, you know, over 1,000 years, lots of people tried to doodle this concept, that there are other images that prefigured da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man."
LESTER: Right. For a long time, there weren't. Vitruvius himself doesn't seem to have illustrated the concept. And although his manuscript was copied for generations, century after century, most of those manuscripts contained almost no illustrations. If they contained any they were, you know, usually just the illustrations of a column or a capital or something. But especially in the 15th century, in the decades leading up to Leonardo's own time in drawing, a number of people begin to try to render that idea in visual form. And in fact, there are some pretty clear indications that, in previous centuries, people had been playing around with it, although maybe not directly. And even if you come to think of it, Christ on the cross has a kind of Vitruvian element to him as well.
DONVAN: David from Leitchfield, Kentucky, has heard our call for people who want to ask questions about this picture or about Leonardo the man, and you're standing by and so you have been for a bit. So, David, you're on TALK OF THE NATION. Hi.(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DAVID: Hey. How are you doing?
DONVAN: Very good.
DAVID: I wanted to see if anybody had ever explored the possibility if da Vinci was trying to draw what possibly could be a God figure, or what could be the perfect image of man and maybe see a reflection of God in it?
DONVAN: Interesting.
LESTER: Sure, and I think there's absolutely that going on, and especially of you think of it as part of a continuum. And in the book, I unpack this at a considerable length, but there are a lot of images of maps of the world and maps of the cosmos where you've got a circle and a square and then this human figure that's at once representing usually in the Christian context, Christ, but then also the kind of father figure, God. And in fact, that's to oversimplify the symbolism of circle and the square. The circle, since ancient times, connoted, you know, things divine and cosmic. It's the perfect shape, that all of its points on its circumference are equidistant from the center, and it was the shape that governed all of the supposed concentric fears that made up to cosmos. And then you've got the human element of things, the square, where you bring things down to Earth and make sense of them, set them right.
DONVAN: David, thanks very much for your call. And I want to bring in John(ph) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. John, hi. You're on TALK OF THE NATION.
JOHN: Yeah. Thanks. I'm just curious. How heavily was he suppressed by the church? In other words, what - how far could he have gotten if he hadn't have worked under that fear? And I'll just take my answer off the air. Thanks.
DONVAN: OK.
LESTER: I don't - in the - looking into the story that I've done, I don't really detect a whole lot. He did...
DONVAN: He got paid by the church a lot. I mean, he got paid to do things in churches, did he not?
LESTER: Usually, he was paid by - sometimes by towns or churches or merchants, sponsors of the arts. But the church, as a kind of monolithic institution that prevented him from doing things, you just don't see much evidence of it. He did dissect bodies later in his life, and it seems that somebody reported him to the church and that caused him some grief. But I don't really think he labored under the feeling that he was trying to push the limits. It's a secular image, but he wasn't necessarily opposed to the church. He didn't set himself out to be that way at least.
DONVAN: The images that - the image of Leonard himself that I think most of us have are, you know, like Beethoven, he has become something of a bust with a austere expression on his face. But you take him - I don't want to say you take him down a few pegs - but you go more internally to a guy who is young and talented, but in some ways not unbelievably secure, and he was really a striver. He really had to push to make his mark particularly when he was young. And talk a little bit about that, about his attempts to, number one, educate himself because he didn't get a great education from anybody else.
LESTER: This - I found this to be a really fun part of the story, and one that people tend not to spend a lot of time talking about. You know, you have the myth of him as this kind of fully-formed genius with a big beard kind of gazing presciently off into the distance and transcending his age. But at the time I'm talking about in the book, which is the 1470s and 1480s, he is coming of age, he's learning the tricks of the trade, he is apprenticing himself to other artists and making mistakes and living it up as well. And then he's trying to make a living, and he's not necessarily doing that well. He had a horrible problem with deadlines. He, I think today, probably would have been diagnosed with ADD. He started things and kept starting them again and again and again, getting deflected by his own kind of ravenous mind into doing researches into other things. If you commissioned a painting from him, good luck.(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DONVAN: And his notebooks, which are famous and there are a lot of them, you know, in which he sketched a lot of his ideas or thoughts and raised so man
JOHN DONVAN: Now let's talk about an image, an image that is a little over 500 years old. It is a drawing, and we practically guarantee that you have seen this image. Does it ring a bell? It is by Leonardo Da Vinci, and it is a drawing of a nude male figure who stands inside a circle within a square. And if you aren't sure what we're talking about, you can find it on our website. The drawing actually has a name, and it's called "Vitruvian Man." And it is the subject of a new book called "Da Vinci's Ghost" by Toby Lester. Very well reviewed book and much discussed. And it tells the tale of how this drawing came to be and the theories that inspired its creation. But it is also a tale about the man behind the image in some ways that the story hasn't been told before, Leonardo Da Vinci, who was adamant about creating an image of the perfectly proportioned man. And in "Da Vinci's Ghost" we learn not only about Da Vinci's drive to create the drawing but also how the image and Da Vinci himself inspired thought about man's role in the universe. So this is the image that sometimes people refer to as the guy doing jumping jacks inside the circle and the square. What would you like to know about Da Vinci and about "Vitruvian Man"? Our number is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. So Toby Lester is the author of this new book, "Da Vinci's Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Image." He is also contributing editor for The Atlantic magazine and joins us now from member station WBUR in Boston. Toby, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION. Hi.
TOBY LESTER: Thanks for having me.
DONVAN: I've been guided by your wisdom ahead of time not to refer to Leonardo Da Vinci as Da Vinci, as so many of us do, and that you, in the book and throughout this conversation, will refer to him as Leonardo and that in that there's a little piece of information, which is what?
LESTER: Well, lots of people do call him Da Vinci, and I'm actually not too opposed to it, but there are plenty of purists out there who will say that Da Vinci just means from Vinci, and this figure named Leonardo was born in the town of Vinci and that's all that's telling you. So it's -- to the purest ear, it sounds very peculiar, but I don't mind it so much. So I'm happy to go whichever way you want.(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DONVAN: All right. Just not Leo. So you actually write, I would say, actually almost a biography of an image and then a biography of the man who made the image. But I've described the image. I'm hoping that people know the one we're talking about. And again, you can run to our website and see it, talk@npr.org - or at npr.org, TALK OF THE NATION. But "Vitruvian Man," the name itself has a story, and it tell us why Leonardo didn't exactly come up with the concept himself. So what is the story of "Vitruvian Man"?
LESTER: Well, the name is a tipoff. Vitruvian derives from the name of a Roman architect called Vitruvius, who wrote and worked in the 1st century BC and who, in a book of his on architecture, described the ideal proportions of the human figure and then said that the human figure, in this kind of ideal form, could be made to fit inside a circle and could be made to fit inside a square. And it's that idea that Leonardo, in his picture, is trying to capture visually. And in fact, the picture has writing on it, and the writing lays out some of those proportions that Leonardo then puts into visual form in his picture.
DONVAN: And - go ahead.
LESTER: No, no. Go ahead.
DONVAN: And what's so interesting also is that Vitruvius was writing about architecture, and he was talking about the need - as I read your book, he was talking about his desire to create architecture that touched a universal form, and the suggestion was that this universal form that should be represented in buildings was actually embodied in the human body. Do I have that right?
LESTER: You're exactly right. Yeah, I mean the idea was that - there had been long this idea of the microcosm, the idea that the human body was a kind of miniature model of the universe as a whole. And if you could study and obtain the kind of blueprint of a universal design that was in display on the human body, then you could understand all sorts of things about the universe. And as a working architect, obviously, if you could kind of latch on to the design principles that made both the human body and the universe perfect, then you could align your buildings with human life and with the kind of cosmic function of everything.
DONVAN: So this idea was so captivating that you write that, you know, over 1,000 years, lots of people tried to doodle this concept, that there are other images that prefigured da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man."
LESTER: Right. For a long time, there weren't. Vitruvius himself doesn't seem to have illustrated the concept. And although his manuscript was copied for generations, century after century, most of those manuscripts contained almost no illustrations. If they contained any they were, you know, usually just the illustrations of a column or a capital or something. But especially in the 15th century, in the decades leading up to Leonardo's own time in drawing, a number of people begin to try to render that idea in visual form. And in fact, there are some pretty clear indications that, in previous centuries, people had been playing around with it, although maybe not directly. And even if you come to think of it, Christ on the cross has a kind of Vitruvian element to him as well.
DONVAN: David from Leitchfield, Kentucky, has heard our call for people who want to ask questions about this picture or about Leonardo the man, and you're standing by and so you have been for a bit. So, David, you're on TALK OF THE NATION. Hi.(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DAVID: Hey. How are you doing?
DONVAN: Very good.
DAVID: I wanted to see if anybody had ever explored the possibility if da Vinci was trying to draw what possibly could be a God figure, or what could be the perfect image of man and maybe see a reflection of God in it?
DONVAN: Interesting.
LESTER: Sure, and I think there's absolutely that going on, and especially of you think of it as part of a continuum. And in the book, I unpack this at a considerable length, but there are a lot of images of maps of the world and maps of the cosmos where you've got a circle and a square and then this human figure that's at once representing usually in the Christian context, Christ, but then also the kind of father figure, God. And in fact, that's to oversimplify the symbolism of circle and the square. The circle, since ancient times, connoted, you know, things divine and cosmic. It's the perfect shape, that all of its points on its circumference are equidistant from the center, and it was the shape that governed all of the supposed concentric fears that made up to cosmos. And then you've got the human element of things, the square, where you bring things down to Earth and make sense of them, set them right.
DONVAN: David, thanks very much for your call. And I want to bring in John(ph) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. John, hi. You're on TALK OF THE NATION.
JOHN: Yeah. Thanks. I'm just curious. How heavily was he suppressed by the church? In other words, what - how far could he have gotten if he hadn't have worked under that fear? And I'll just take my answer off the air. Thanks.
DONVAN: OK.
LESTER: I don't - in the - looking into the story that I've done, I don't really detect a whole lot. He did...
DONVAN: He got paid by the church a lot. I mean, he got paid to do things in churches, did he not?
LESTER: Usually, he was paid by - sometimes by towns or churches or merchants, sponsors of the arts. But the church, as a kind of monolithic institution that prevented him from doing things, you just don't see much evidence of it. He did dissect bodies later in his life, and it seems that somebody reported him to the church and that caused him some grief. But I don't really think he labored under the feeling that he was trying to push the limits. It's a secular image, but he wasn't necessarily opposed to the church. He didn't set himself out to be that way at least.
DONVAN: The images that - the image of Leonard himself that I think most of us have are, you know, like Beethoven, he has become something of a bust with a austere expression on his face. But you take him - I don't want to say you take him down a few pegs - but you go more internally to a guy who is young and talented, but in some ways not unbelievably secure, and he was really a striver. He really had to push to make his mark particularly when he was young. And talk a little bit about that, about his attempts to, number one, educate himself because he didn't get a great education from anybody else.
LESTER: This - I found this to be a really fun part of the story, and one that people tend not to spend a lot of time talking about. You know, you have the myth of him as this kind of fully-formed genius with a big beard kind of gazing presciently off into the distance and transcending his age. But at the time I'm talking about in the book, which is the 1470s and 1480s, he is coming of age, he's learning the tricks of the trade, he is apprenticing himself to other artists and making mistakes and living it up as well. And then he's trying to make a living, and he's not necessarily doing that well. He had a horrible problem with deadlines. He, I think today, probably would have been diagnosed with ADD. He started things and kept starting them again and again and again, getting deflected by his own kind of ravenous mind into doing researches into other things. If you commissioned a painting from him, good luck.(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DONVAN: And his notebooks, which are famous and there are a lot of them, you know, in which he sketched a lot of his ideas or thoughts and raised so man
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