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.

This book recovers the lives of four men masked behind one legend. Reinterpreting recently rediscovered documents shows a Tuscan artist Leonardo da Vinci was banished from Florence around 1477, when at the same moment another Leonardo arrived from the East, an Ottoman agent from Genoese Caffa in the Black Sea. This Leonardo was a military engineer, who began writing technical notes backward in a flourishing Italian script. In Florence, around 1500, he met the alchemist and polymath Zoroastro, who collaborated in producing the scientific Notebooks. However, by the mid-sixteenth century, all memory of Zoroastro had been erased, and the two Leonardos had been conflated into one identity. Crucially, an archived document, rediscovered around 2021, proved that the Tuscan painter Leonardo da Vinci died in 1499. This information leads to the recovery of the artist who really painted the Mona Lisa, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio.

Delving into reasons biographers assume Tuscan painter Leonardo da Vinci wrote the Notebooks, hunting down sources and original texts, South African art historian Susan Grundy uncovers it was only Leonardo’s young heir Milanese Francesco Melzi who said these were the artist's Notebooks. In the nineteenth century European scholars began to access these Notebooks in more depth, transcribing the arcane backwards Italian and translating them into English. They discovered a man who did not seem to be Tuscan Leoanrdo da Vinci, as he seemed to be a man from the East. Yet, this reality was closed down by researchers determined to continue with the myth of the self-educated genius from a farm in Tuscany.

A brief survey of what Leonardo anti-theory is, why it exists, who writes it, and what purpose it can play in the future of Leonardo research..

After Chester lands, in the Times Square subway station, he makes himself comfortable in a nearby newsstand. There, he has the good fortune to make three new friends: Mario, a little boy whose parents run the falling newsstand, Tucker, a fast-talking Broadway mouse, and Tucker's sidekick, Harry the Cat. The escapades of these four friends in bustling New York City makes for lively listening and humorous entertainment. And somehow, they manage to bring a taste of success to the nearly bankrupt newsstand. Join Chester Cricket and his friends in this classic children's book by George Selden, with illustrations by Garth Williams. The Cricket in Times Square is a 1961 Newbery Honor Book.

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam . In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India.