Polyhedrons, Art, And Architecture in Renaissance Venice

Abstract

Scholars have long studied the influence of perspective in Italian Renaissance. The aim of this essay is to focus on a specific place and period of time, dealing with artists, mathematicians and scholars that lived and worked in Venice from the beginning to the second half of the of 16th century. In particular, I would like to explain why proportion and polyhedrons were welcomed into the artistic expressions of the Venetian Renaissance society. For this purpose, I would like to recon- struct the cultural environment that animated Venice, focusing on the role played by the mathemati- cians as well as analyzing the virtuous perspectives performed by the artists in the city. I would like to reconnect also the few but significant clues that art, mathematics, and perspective have handed down to us, starting from a sort of a cultural manifesto proposed by Luca Pacioli: the mathematiza- tion of the world.