Da Vinci's \textit{Codex Atlanticus}, fols. 395r and 686r--686v, refers to Leonardo Pisano \textit{volgarizzato}, not to Giorgio Valla

DOI10.1016/J.HM.2023.06.001MaRDI QIDQ6082472zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Dominique Raynaud

Publication date 6 November 2023

Published in Historia Mathematica (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1016/J.HM.2023.06.001

zbMATH Keywords

\textit{Codex Atlanticus}mathematical sources

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

History of Greek and Roman mathematics (01A20) History of mathematics in Late Antiquity and medieval Europe (01A35) History of mathematics in the 15th and 16th centuries, Renaissance (01A40)

Review text

It is shown that folios 395r, 686r--686v of the \textit{Codex Atlanticus}, anonymous folios, inserted in Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, do not deal with the duplication of the cube proper, but rather with the extraction of the cube root by the geometrical methods invented by Archytas of Tarentum and Philo of Byzantium. These ancient methods were translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona, to be subsequently adapted to arithmetic in Leonardo Pisano's \textit{Practica geometrie} (1220), later translated into \textit{volgare} in Benedetto da Firenze's \textit{Trattato di praticha d'arismetrica} (1463). This corrects a misattribution, going back to \textit{L. Reti} [``The two unpublished manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci in the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid. II, Burlington Mag. 110, No, 779, 81--89 (1968), \url{http://www.jstor.org/stable/875523}] and repeated often since that time, which sees those folios as originating in Giorgio Valla's \textit{De expetendis et fugiendibus rebus} (1501). The author also points out the methodological flaws that led to the misattribution (the basic flaw being ``to isolate two texts beforehand to show, on the basis of vague similarities, that one is the source of the other).

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Cited in

(1)

• Un Fragment duDe speculis comburentibusde Regiomontanus Copié par Toscanelli et Inséré dans les Carnets de Leonardo (Codex Atlanticus, 611rb/915ra)

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