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Rooted in little-known episodes of the artist's colourful career, and taking in ideas including theories of the cosmos, Roman land-surveying and the relationship between anatomy and architecture, the book tells the story of his evolving, lifelong study of the human body, restoring in vivid detail the intellectual and cultural spheres of fifteenth-century Florence and Milan. Beautifully illustrated with da Vinci's drawings and those of his predecessors, Da Vinci's Ghost is both a personal story and a grand saga of intellectual discovery that brilliantly reconstructs the artistry and scholarship of one of the world's greatest creative minds.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49511482065169,"sku":"GOR003513589","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50131106726161,"sku":"GOR008411431","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51505510154513,"sku":"GOR004245397","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1846684544.jpg?v=1751412085"},{"product_id":"fourth-part-of-the-world-book-toby-lester-9781416535317","title":"The Fourth Part of the World","description":"Old maps lead you to strange and unexpected places, and none does so more ineluctably than the subject of this book: the giant, beguiling Waldseem ller world map of 1507. So begins this remarkable story of the map that gave America its name. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eFor millennia Europeans believed that the world consisted of three parts: Europe, Africa, and Asia. They drew the three continents in countless shapes and sizes on their maps, but occasionally they hinted at the existence of a fourth part of the world, a mysterious, inaccessible place, separated from the rest by a vast expanse of ocean. It was a land of myth--until 1507, that is, when Martin Waldseem ller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure scholars working in the mountains of eastern France, made it real. Columbus had died the year before convinced that he had sailed to Asia, but Waldseem ller and Ringmann, after reading about the Atlantic discoveries of Columbus's contemporary Amerigo Vespucci, came to a startling conclusion: Vespucci had reached the fourth part of the world. 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In Lester's telling the map comes alive: Marco Polo and the early Christian missionaries trek across Central Asia and China; Europe's early humanists travel to monastic libraries to recover ancient texts; Portuguese merchants round up the first West African slaves; Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci make their epic voyages of discovery; and finally, vitally, Nicholas Copernicus makes an appearance, deducing from the new geography shown on the Waldseem ller map that the earth could not lie at the center of the cosmos. The map literally altered humanity's worldview. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eOne thousand copies of the map were printed, yet only one remains. Discovered accidentally in 1901 in the library of a German castle it was bought in 2003 for the unprecedented sum of $10 million by the Library of Congress, where it is now on permanent public display. 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It was the first map to show the New World as a separate continent, alongside Europe, Africa and Asia - and the first on which the word 'America' appears. It was the first map to suggest the existence of the Pacific. It was, in short, the first map to depict the whole world as we know it today.  Beautiful, fascinating and revealing, it arrived on the scene as Europeans were moving out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, thanks to a tiny group of European mapmakers who pieced together ideas going back to the ancients and through Marco Polo to Vespucci. In The Fourth Part of the World, Toby Lester charts the amazing and colourful history of this map, whose profound influence has been neglected for centuries and which changed the world-view of all humankind.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49546890772753,"sku":"GOR003083471","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49991733379345,"sku":"GOR006333655","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50726582714641,"sku":"GOR012452342","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53360687874321,"sku":"GOR011111061","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1861978030.jpg?v=1751123758"},{"product_id":"da-vinci-s-ghost-book-toby-lester-9781439189238","title":"Da Vinci's Ghost","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eDa Vinci's Ghost\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eDeftly weaving together art, architecture, history, theology, and much else, \u003ci\u003eDa Vinci's Ghost \u003c\/i\u003eis a first-rate intellectual enchantment.\u003cb\u003e--\u003c\/b\u003eCharles Mann, author of \u003ci\u003e1493\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eDa Vinci didn't summon Vitruvian Man out of thin air. 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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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWritten with the same narrative flair and intellectual sweep as Lester's award-winning first book, the almost unbearably thrilling (Simon Winchester) \u003ci\u003eFourth Part of the World, \u003c\/i\u003eand beautifully illustrated with Da Vinci's drawings, \u003ci\u003eDa Vinci's Ghost\u003c\/i\u003e follows Da Vinci on his journey to understanding the secrets of the Vitruvian man. 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