September 03, 2018 Monday
Bedtime Story
Piero della Francesca Loved to Indulge in Mathematics
Last night we had moved from one
Renaissance master of Florence to another, from Brunelleschi to Piero della
Francesca.
Though Piero was trained in mathematics
more for the sake of its applications in business and commerce, he undertook an
in-depth study of its application to art for its own sake.
We know of at least three books that he
published on mathematics which signifies that his interest in mathematics was
neither casual nor ostensible:
(1) Abacus Treatise
(2) Short Book on the five Regular Solids
(serious work on solid geometry)
(3) On Perspective of Painting (De prospective
pingendi which is a Latin title but the book itself was written in Italian which
meant that his target audience was not merely the professionally trained
masters but the general public as well).
Besides these three original books that
Francesca wrote, he also took interest in the works of Archimedes.
He copied several of the works of
Archimedes and made his own illustrations on them.
The treatises of Archimedes that Francesca
worked upon included:
On the Sphere and the Cylinder
On the Measurement of the Circle
On Conoids and Spheroids
On spirals
On the Equilibrium of Planes
On the Quadrature of Parabola
The Sand Reckoner
Yet it is the third book of Francesca ‘On
the Perspective of Painting’ that is of direct interest to us.
It was written somewhere between 1474 and
1482 which Piero devoted solely to the subject perspective in drawings.
The work itself was inspired from Leon
Alberti’s De Pictura (On Painting) that was written some forty years ago.
This shows how thanks to the writing and
recording of individual works and discoveries we apes have been able to - in
small increments - manage to cumulate so much knowledge that each new generation
finds it extremely difficult to catch up with.
This book, besides the obvious study in
perspective, also contained in it arithmetic, algebra, flat and solid geometry
and this was probably inspired from the works of Euclid.
The book itself consisted of three parts:
(a) Part one was totally dedicated to the
painting of faces
(b) Part two dealt solely with the
description of types of perspectives laying a theoretical background
(c) Part three dealt with the art of
creating perspective with the cunning use of colors and their shades
Two libraries or biblioteca saved it from
getting destroyed and thus lost in oblivion: one was the Palatina library in
the city of Parma, Italy and later Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which still
stands tall today housing medieval Christian and Arabic manuscripts.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee
or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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