Extracts from Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità (Summary of Arithmetic, Geometry, Proportions, and Proportionality) and De re aedificatoria (On Building)

Extracts from Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità (Summary of Arithmetic, Geometry, Proportions, and Proportionality) and De re aedificatoria (On Building)

This booklet consists of extracts, abbreviated and transliterated into Venetian-inflected Italian, drawn from the major texts of Renaissance mathematics and architecture: Luca Pacioli’s Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità and Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria. Pacioli’s Summa, which consists of an Italian-language synthesis of mathematical knowledge, was first printed in Venice in 1494 by Paganini. The extracts found in this booklet are taken from the second part of the Summa, which is dedicated to geometry. The second set of extracts concerns the elements of classical architecture. Finally, this book contains three recipes for making ink and two remedies for stomach aches added to its final leaves, proof of ongoing use of the item in a reader’s daily life. Perhaps owned by an architect-in-training, it demonstrates how geometry, as a branch of the quadrivium, came to influence theories of architecture and their real-life application.

Authors: Luca Pacioli, Leon Battista Alberti

after 1494

Manuscript on paper, 18 fols.

University of Pennsylvania, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, LJS 488

Venice (?), Italy