Biography Artists, Architects & Photographers Books

His epitaph called him a man of probity, a natural philosopher who was outstandingly generous … then his sepulcher was destroyed and his entire literary legacy stolen.Zoroastro Masino was an actual historical person in Renaissance Italy – a magician, a metallurgist, a discoverer, an alchemist, a prophet with a Persian name. Marginalized by xenophobic forces even before he passed away, he was mocked for a name common people in Italy could not pronounce. Little known beyond the inside few who control Leonardo’s modern biography, Zoroastro and Leonardo joined forces as young men and were always in each other’s orbit. Zoroastro and Leonardo were a life story, leading to the logical conclusion it was the foreigner Zoroastro who wrote the Notebooks, not Leonardo.This book also brings to light important documents that vanished or were stolen over the centuries, and recovers a number of proposed lost works. These are a missing treatise on anatomy, with illustrations of at least twelve full-length anatomical figures executed by Leonardo; Zoroastro’s book on games and magic La Schifanoia (to avoid boredom), 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 published as his own, Thus spake Zarathustra. A further anonymously published poem, Antiquarie prospettiche romane was likely also part of Zoroastro’s writings. Author Susan Grundy first began this groundbreaking research of Zoroastro while studying the claims of various copies of the Mona Lisa. As she was fact checking Leonardo’s life story, she quickly became disenchanted with the contradictions and counter-contradictions that seemed to infest his proposed biography, even five-hundred years after he died. Discovering countless anomalies in the many thousands of pages of notes attributed to Leonardo, it was the unexplained tales of Eastern travels she found particularly disturbing. Every fifty to one-hundred years a theory turns the academic world on its head. The Zoroastrian Papers is one of these.