Vitruvian Man

A FLAME TREE SKETCHBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the sketchbooks combine high-quality production with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for artists, notetakers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are printed on foil paper, embossed then foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. The covers are created by our artists and designers who spend many hours transforming original artwork into gorgeous 3d masterpieces that feel good in the hand, and look wonderful on a desk or table. THE ARTIST. Painter, draughtsman, architect, military engineer, musician, scientific researcher, designer: Leonardo da Vinci was all these and more, and through his drawings we find the most direct access to his genius. This example is based on 'The Vitruvian Man', c. 1492 and printed on silver. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said,"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

An award-winning author takes on the genesis of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. In this modest drawing, da Vinci attempted nothing less than to calibrate the harmonies of the universe and understand the central role man played in the cosmos. Lester brings Vitruvian Man to life, resurrecting the ghost of an unknown da Vinci.

Professionalism is political. This book offers a new assessment of the Roman architect Vitruvius and his treatise, On Architecture, dedicated to Augustus in the 20s BCE. Once reviled by scholars, Vitruvius emerges as an imperial expert par excellence when read alongside literary coevals through an intertextual lens. No building of Vitruvius' name survives from antiquity, but his treatise remains a formidable literary construction that partakes of Rome's vibrant textual culture. The book explores Vitruvius' portrait of the ideal architect as an imposing "Vitruvian man" at the dawn of Augustus' empire. In direct dialogue with his republican model, Cicero's ideal orator, the architect embodies a distinctly imperial civic ethos in which technically skilled partisans supersede old elites as guarantors of Augustan authority. Vitruvius promises to shape not only the emperor's legacy with architecture, but also the notion of a Roman citizen through his ideal architect.

This book provides the most important and illuminating analysis of Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man drawing that has ever been made in the more than 500 years that have elapsed since its production. Everyone in the past has focused on how the drawing illustrates the fit of the human body to both a square and a circle. However, this was not the real intent of the drawing, but served mainly as a distraction to divert attention from the anomalies that hide a truly dark revelation. It has been discovered that Da Vinci followed a mathematically precise geometric model for the construction not only of the square, the circle and the equilateral triangle (which fits the spread-apart pair of legs), but also of a pentagram which Da Vinci chose to hide. With this model, all 4 of the geometric shapes are pure functions of the radius of the circle. Although Da Vinci hid the pentagram, most likely because he was using it as a Freemasonic occult symbol, he pointed to its hidden presence by creating a device which makes use of a slight reduction in the radius of the model circle and a minor change in one corner of the square. Even more intriguing are several distortions in the body shape of the human figure in the drawing. These were deliberately constructed to have the man's body fit the image of the ancient dual serpent god Ningishzida. This god is known as a fertility god and a healer, but since the image of Ningishzida is likely a predecessor of the caduceus (the staff of Hermes or Mercury), there seems to be a more sinister aspect to Da Vinci's use of this deity. The Greek god Hermes, who was called Mercury by the Romans, was considered to be the god of thieves as well as a god of deception and trickery. In fitting the human shape to Ningishzida, Da Vinci appears to be proclaiming the rulership of this serpent god over humanity. In the process, he also appears to have found a clever way to indicate that he was gay. It also seems that Da Vinci was showing that Ningishzida creates a satanic chakra system which is superimposed on our yogic chakra system to repress it and connect us to a satanic consciousness. Despite the heavy indoctrination that NASA has promoted for over 50 years saying that Mars is a lifeless planet, the topography of the planet overwhelmingly reveals through scientific measurements that the huge mountains, many craters and other landforms did not arise from natural forces but instead have been artificially constructed. It has been found that the 4 giant mountains of Olympus Mons, Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons and Arsia Mons have been artificially arranged to provide a template for a virtual Vitruvian Martian which can be constructed using the exact same model used by Da Vinci. There is a pyramid nearby which is approximately 30 km in diameter and has the shape of a perfect pentagram. The Martian architects used the 2 northern star points of the pyramid to delineate the radius and the centre (naval position) of the circle which fits the Vitruvian Martian. Da Vinci, as a Freemason, probably had access to privileged information about Mars. It is likely that he used the model of the Vitruvian Martian as the basis for his drawing of the Vitruvian Man. He distorted the model and the human figure in order to secretly send occult messages to elite members of Freemasonry. The distortions are also very likely to have been intended to serve as subliminal messages to the masses in order to exert a satanic influence on an unsuspecting public.

Essays on the changing relationship of the human body and architecture.

Featuring da Vinci's world-famous Vitruvian Man illustration on the cover, this pocket-sized notebook features 64 blank pages and makes a great place to store phone numbers, appointments, and more. It's also a wonderfully portable sketchbook.

In Da Vinci's Ghost, critically acclaimed historian Toby Lester tells the story of the world’s most iconic image, the Vitruvian Man, and sheds surprising new light on the artistry and scholarship of Leonardo da Vinci, one of history’s most fascinating figures. Deftly weaving together art, architecture, history, theology, and much else, Da Vinci's Ghost is a first-rate intellectual enchantment.”—Charles Mann, author of 1493 Da Vinci didn’t summon Vitruvian Man out of thin air. He was inspired by the idea originally formulated by the Roman architect Vitruvius, who suggested that the human body could be made to fit inside a circle, long associated with the divine, and a square, related to the earthly and secular. To place a man inside those shapes was to imply that the human body could indeed be a blueprint for the workings of the universe. Da Vinci elevated Vitruvius’ idea to exhilarating heights when he set out to do something unprecedented, if the human body truly reflected the cosmos, he reasoned, then studying its anatomy more thoroughly than had ever been attempted before—peering deep into body and soul—might grant him an almost godlike perspective on the makeup of the world. Written with the same narrative flair and intellectual sweep as Lester’s award-winning first book, the “almost unbearably thrilling” (Simon Winchester) Fourth Part of the World, and beautifully illustrated with Da Vinci's drawings, Da Vinci’s Ghost follows Da Vinci on his journey to understanding the secrets of the Vitruvian man. It captures a pivotal time in Western history when the Middle Ages were giving way to the Renaissance, when art, science, and philosophy were rapidly converging, and when it seemed possible that a single human being might embody—and even understand—the nature of the universe.