Famous work · not an exact-location map point
Portrait of Luca Pacioli
The Franciscan mathematician Luca Pacioli demonstrating a theorem, a glass polyhedron hanging beside him — a portrait with no setting, only instruments of geometry.
No real-world viewpoint
This work does not depict a place you can visit — see the notes below.
Portrait of Luca Pacioli — at a glance
- Artist
- Attributed to Jacopo de' Barbari (c. 1460/70 – before 1516)
- Year
- c. 1495–1500
- Movement
- Italian Renaissance
- Subject
- A portrait of the mathematician Luca Pacioli — no depicted setting
- Medium
- Oil and tempera on panel
- Dimensions
- c. 99 × 120 cm
- Now at
- Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
Overview
This portrait, generally attributed to Jacopo de' Barbari and dated about 1495–1500, shows the Franciscan friar and mathematician Luca Pacioli standing at a table covered with a green cloth, drawing a geometrical figure on a slate with one hand while pointing into an open book with the other. A model of a polyhedron in wood sits on the table; a beautiful glass rhombicuboctahedron, half-filled with water, hangs from the ceiling at the upper left. A richly dressed young man stands behind. It is oil (and tempera) on panel, about 99 by 120 cm, and it hangs in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.
There is no setting
Scholarship The portrait has no depicted place: the figures stand against a plain dark ground with only the table, the books and the mathematical models. Pacioli was a Franciscan (Order of Friars Minor) and taught mathematics in several Italian cities — Venice, Milan, Florence — but the picture locates him not in a room or a city but among the tools of geometry. It is included among mapped works only nominally; it is really a portrait of a discipline.
What is in the painting?
Pacioli, in the brown habit of a friar, faces the viewer, his left hand on an open copy of Euclid, his right drawing on a slate lettered with a reference to Euclid. On the table: the closed volume of his own ‘Summa’, a piece of chalk, a wooden model of a dodecahedron, a pair of dividers. Overhead hangs the glass 26-sided solid, catching light and a reflection of a building. The young man behind — sometimes identified as Dürer or as a pupil, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro — is finely dressed.
Look closely
The hanging glass solid
A 26-sided glass rhombicuboctahedron, half-filled with water, hangs at the upper left, catching light and a reflection.
The wooden dodecahedron
A solid wooden model of a Platonic solid sits on the green table cloth.
Euclid open on the table
Pacioli's left hand rests on an open copy of Euclid's ‘Elements’ as he draws on the slate.
His own ‘Summa’
The closed volume on the table is Pacioli's mathematical encyclopaedia, printed in 1494.
Analysis
Composition and technique
Two half-length figures behind a table of mathematical objects, against a dark void, painted with sharp still-life precision.
Scholarship The picture is built like a still life of geometry: every instrument, page and facet of the hanging polyhedron is rendered with crystalline exactness, and the transparent glass solid with its water and reflections is a virtuoso passage. The emptiness around the figures throws all attention onto the objects and the demonstration.
Meaning and interpretation
Interpretations differ. What the artist documented, what museums and scholars propose, and later or speculative theories are marked and kept separate.
Mathematics as the picture's subject
Pacioli wrote the first printed account of double-entry bookkeeping and, with Leonardo, the treatise ‘De divina proportione’. The portrait presents him mid-proof, surrounded by the Platonic and Archimedean solids, as the embodiment of a discipline — a portrait of geometry itself as much as of a man.
History & provenance
The panel is in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, from the Farnese collection.
Sources
- Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples — collection entry for the ‘Portrait of Luca Pacioli’ (attrib. Jacopo de' Barbari, c. 1495–1500)
- Nick Mackinnon, ‘The Portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli’, The Mathematical Gazette (1993)
