attributed to Jacopo de' Barbari: Portrait of Luca Pacioli with a student (1495-1500)

(National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples, Italy)

A painting attributed to the Italian artist Jacopo de' Barbari (1460/70-before 1516). The main person on this painting is the man in the middle. He is the Italian Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli (1445-1517), a mathematician and the math teacher of Leonardo da Vinci. Luca Pacioli is best known for several works he wrote on mathematics and his contributions to bookkeeping (for this he is known as 'the father of bookkeeping'). The painting shows Luca, wearing the habit of his Franciscan order, behind a table which is filled with geometrical tools: a slate, chalk, a compass, a dodecahedron model. Luca himself is drawing a construction on a board which has the words "Euclides" on it - this refers to the Greek mathematician and farther of Geometry, Euclid of Alexandria (325 BC - 270 BC). The left hand of Luca is resting on an open book. This is probably the "Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalità", which Luca wrote. Hanging in the top left corner is a rhombicuboctahedron which is half-filled with water. Seen in the reflection of this rhombicuboctahedron is the Ducal Palace of Urbino. The identity of the man behind Luca is unknown - it could be that this is duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro of Urbino (1472 – 1508), a scholar of mathematics and to whom the Summa was dedicated. Painting from 1495-1500