2009
Dimensions 17 x 24 cm.
Paperback
Bound in rigid paperboard with dust jacket
ISBN 978-88-95642-25-3
pp.286, ill. 150

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Argante Ciocci

LUCA PACIOLI: COLLEAGUE OF PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA AND LEONARDO


Luca Pacioli was a leading figure in the mathematics and civil culture of the Renaissance.
The link he provided between the Latin culture of the erudite and the vulgar culture of practitioners led him to teach mathematics in the most important cities of the Italian Renaissance. It was as a teacher of Euclidean geometry that Pacioli had the opportunity to get to know the leading painters, sculptors, engineers, architects, craftsmen, accountants, and experts in the art of war in the second half of the fifteenth century.
It was in his dealings with practitioners and artists like Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci that Luca Pacioli developed a new vision of mathematics and its role in the sciences and arts.
Pacioli's cultural project – which was founded on the centrality of proportion to all fields of human knowledge, and on the mathematical and geometric conception of the world that he outlined in his treatise De divina proportione - achieved wide success in the sixteenth century. This book follows the course of the life and works of Luca Pacioli, and, contrary to many historiographic interpretations of the twentieth century, restores to the friar from Sansepolcro the cultural importance and leading role that he enjoyed during the Italian Renaissance.


Argante Ciocci, studied Philosophy in Perugia and went on to become a research doctor in the History of Science with a thesis on Luca Pacioli. His scientific interests are reflected in the articles he has written for specialist journals, and cover the Renaissance and scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. The research he carried out for his doctorate culminated in 2003 with the publication of his book Luca Pacioli e la matematizzazione del sapere nel Rinascimento.