Leonardo on Display at Mateureka Museum in Pennabilli, the Intriguing Cave of Numbers

After the great Italian and French cities, also a small Romagna village that is my heart, Pennabilli, honors Leonardo da Vinci with an exhibition on the occasion of the 500 years since his death. The original Mateureka, Museum of Mathematics and Calculation Mateureka, created by Professor Renzo Baldoni in this country in the hinterland of Rimini, made more famous by the poet and screenwriter Tonino Guerra, has set up the exhibition “The winning tables in the De Divina Proportione” that presents a fundamental aspect to better understand the work of the great artist.

The exhibition presents the influence that the mathematician Luca Pacioli had on Leonardo in the field of mathematics and painting. From the mathematical analysis of the drawings and sketches, present in the Codes of Leonardo, we understand that the correspondence, 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.

Regarding the perspective in his paintings, the exhibition analyzes three works: the Annunciation, of youth age; the Adoration of the Magi, of the Florentine period, and the Upper Room, of the Milan period characterized by collaboration and friendship between Luke and Leonardo.

But the heart of the exhibition is the public display, for the first time, of all the 60 color tables of the polyhedra 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.

An exhibition designed mainly for schoolchildren in Visit to the museum and from them accessible from January to May, but open every day, also to individual visitors, in June, July and August 2019.