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Abstract
Although the famous Portrait of Luca Pacioli and Disciple is a favorite illustration in surveys of Renaissance history and the history of science and mathematics, little is known about it. A detailed analysis of its contents and cultural context reveals that rather than a simple double portrait, the painting celebrated the achievements of mathematical humanists and their education program. The analytic skills that they championed were based on the visual language of Euclidean geometry. Not surprisingly, the diagrams of the Elements as printed by Erhard Ratdolt (Venice, 1482) are the focus of the picture and its complex iconography.
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Renzo Baldasso
Renzo Baldasso is a fellow at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. After completing his doctorate (Columbia University, 2007), he has been a fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, the Folger Institute, the Newberry Library, the Huntington Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art [Library of Congress, John W. Kluge Center, Scholars Colonnade, LJ120, 101 Independence Avenue, S.E., Washington, D.C. 20540-4860, [email protected]].