Book Description

Relevant. Challenging. A paradigm shift. Little considered by insiders who control Leonardo’s modern biography, the now barely considered Zoroastro Masino was an Italian man with a Persian name ( زَرَادُشْت ). He was an actual historical person – recorded as a magician, a metallurgist, a discoverer, an alchemist, and a prophet, in contemporary record. Marginalized by xenophobic forces even before he passed away, Zoroastro was mocked for a name common people in Italy could not pronounce. Zoroastro's epitaph called him a man of probity, a natural philosopher who was outstandingly generous. He was known to have been friends with high ranking Italians, his bones preserved in a tomb in Rome wedged between a well-known Italian poet and a Greek scholar. Then his sepulcher was destroyed in the 17th century and his entire literary legacy appears to have been stolen. This book brings to light proposed lost Zoroastro writings, including a missing treatise on anatomy, undoubtedly plagiarised by a Swiss physician in the sixteenth century, a book on games and magic, wrongly ascribed to Luca Pacioli and published under a pretentious Latin title De viribus quantitatis, and a book of personal philosophy, which the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche misappropriated and published as his own work, Thus Spake Zarathustra. A further anonymously published poem, Antiquarie prospettiche romane is also reinterpreted. There are the Notebooks, long attributed to the Tuscan painter Leonardo da Vinci, yet discovered in the late-nineteenth century to be full of Eastern wonders and tales of exotic travels in the Middle East. Were some of these also Zoroastro's? The lost papers of Zoroastro follows two previous titles by the same author, Leonardo: the making and breaking of a myth and The Stolen Notebooks: Leonardo da Vinci and the man from the East.