Income and outcome

Abstract

Few have heard of Father Luca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry book-keeping; but he has probably had much more influence on human life than has Dante, or Michelangelo. Herbert Muller 13 March 1500. Two men are walking across the great square of San Marco in Venice. The monk is from Borgo San Sepulcro: he is a mathematician, 53 years old, and he has been travelling for the last few weeks with a 47-year-old artist from Anchiano. They have recently left Milan where they were the guests of Ludovico il Moro at his colossal Castello Sforzesco, but on 6 October 1499 the French army invaded Milan and Ludovico was forced to flee. Almost a century will pass before Shakespeare writes The Merchant of Venice , but the monk's mathematical skills turn out to be of great practical assistance to merchants: initially in Italy, but later worldwide. The artist is also destined for immortality: a few years later he will create the most famous painting in the world. So what did Leonardo da Vinci, artist and designer of flying machines, find so compelling about the mind of Luca Pacioli, mathematician and ambassador of accountancy? And what made the author of the critically acclaimed 1494 opus Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita so interested in the relationship between mathematics and art? Was this the first and last time that the words ‘creative’ and ‘accountancy’ were combined in a context untarnished by suspicion?