Everybody knows the image, but nobody knows its story. In 1490, Leonardo da Vinci produced his iconic drawing of a man inscribed in a circle and a square: Vitruvian Man. Today the image appears on everything from coffee cups and T-shirts to corporate logos and spacecraft, and has become the world's most famous cultural icon. Yet few people know anything about it. In this remarkable book, Toby Lester, the author of the award-winning Fourth Part of the World, tells the picture's story, weaving together a saga of people and ideas that sheds surprising new light on the life and work of Leonardo, one of history's most fascinating figures.godlike perspective of the world's makeup. Da Vinci's Ghost 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 possible, at least to Leonardo da Vinci, that a single human being might embody--and even understand--the nature of everything.