Portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli and an Unknown Young Man

1495 · Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples

portrait

Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli (sometimes Paciolo) (1446/7-1517) was an Italian mathematician and Franciscan friar, collaborator with Leonardo da Vinci, and seminal contributor to the field now known as accounting. He was also called Luca di Borgo after his birthplace, Borgo Santo Sepolcro, Tuscany. The table is filled with geometrical tools: slate, chalk, compass, a dodecahedron model and a rhombicuboctahedron half-filed with water is hanging in the air.

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Portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli and an Unknown Young Man

About the Artist

Jacopo de' Barbari

1445 – 1516

Venetian painter, copper engraver and wood carver. He met Dürer in Venice in 1494-96. After 1500 he worked in Germany (Nuremberg, Wittenberg, Frankfurt/Oder) using the name Jakob Walch. He became court painter for the Emperor Maximilian in Nuremberg, and - from 1503-04 - the Elector Frederick III (the Wise). From 1510 he became court painter of the Governor of the Netherlands, Margaret of Austria in Brussels. He painted mainly religious and mythological pictures and signed nearly all his works with a caduceus. Barbari's idiosyncratic facial and figural types influenced contemporary masters such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans von Kulmbach and Jan Gossart.

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