Piero della Francesca: Libellus de quinque corporibus regolaribus

Piero della Francesca: Libellus de quinque corporibus regolaribus

Piero della Francesca (um 1420–1491) is considered to be one of the great masters of the early Italian Renaissance. He completed numerous panel paintings and murals in the service of the Duke of Urbino inter alia. The intensive treatment of perspective and geometry is clearly discernible in his art, which simultaneously made the painter an art theoretician.

A Document on Art Theory

One of the main artistic objectives of Piero della Francesca was the attempt to solve perspectival problems with the help of mathematics. It was for this purpose that he wrote a treatise on spatial geometry ca. 1480, known by the title Libellus de quinque corporibus regolaribus. This “booklet” is the Renaissance’s first treatise on geometry, which was concerned with the construction and calculation of geometric figures. The extremely interesting text is furnished with numerous depictions of complicated geometric forms, tables, and calculations.

The Painter’s Musings

A special specimen of this text is stored under the shelf mark Urb.lat. 632 in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Piero della Francesca’s treatise on geometry was written down by an anonymous scribe here, but is furnished with Piero’s own drawings, corrections, and addenda. The treatise was additionally dedicated to Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino

A Plagiarized Work

The fame of this great geometric treatise by Piero della Francesca is underscored by a curious anecdote: Fra Luca Pacioli published the work as his own in the 16th century, not in the original Latin, but in an Italian translation as a part of his writing on the Divina Proportione. It was Giorgio Vasari who finally discovered this plagiarism and once again attributed the Libellus to its actual writer, Piero della Francesca.