It will be extended until 30 August 2020, the lucky exhibition “The winning tables in the De Divina Proportione”, set up at the Mateureka, Museum of Mathematics and Calculation MATEUREKA of Pennabilli (Rimini), which opened on June 1 and whose closure was scheduled on September 1, 2019.
The exhibition, designed to celebrate Leonardo da Vinci on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of his death in Romagna, presents a little known but fundamental aspect to better understand the work of the great artist, namely the influence that the mathematician Luca Pacioli (Sansepolcro, 1445 – Rome, 1517) had on the Grand Master Renaissance in the field of eating and painting.
The exhibition curated by prof. Renzo Baldoni, museum director, has attracted the schoolchildren in Visits to the museum that have noticed numerous not only from the neighbouring regions of Romagna, Tuscany and Marche but from all over Italy.
From the mathematical analysis of the drawings and sketches, present in the Codes of Leonardo, it is clear that the mathematics, present in his writings, must be distinguished in two periods: before the encounter with Luca Pacioli and after this meeting, which took place in Milan in 1496.
The heart of the exhibition is the public display, for the first time, of all the 60 color tables of the polyhedrons that Leonardo painted to thank his friend Luca for the lessons of mathematics and geometry obtained in Milan. These tables have a remarkable artistic interest and are wonderful to see so much that Pacioli himself, fascinated by their beauty, inserted them in his volume on the proportion, called by him divine, and presents them with these words:
“The supraeme et legiadrissime figures de tutti li platonici et mathematici bodies regular et dependent, than in prospective design it is not possible to make them better,... facte et formate del prencipci oggi fra mortal Lionardo nostra da Venci”.
As for the perspective in his paintings, the exhibition analyses three works:Announcement, of youth age,Adoration of the Magi, of the Florentine period, and the Cena, of the Milanese period characterized by the collaboration and friendship between Luca and Leonardo. While in the first two works the genius da Vinci applies the perspective with the accuracy that every good artist of the time would use for craft, inLast Supper, on the other hand, the relation perspective is perfect.