CHAPTER XXIII — Critical Commentary & Notes

How, Out of Reverence for Our Salvation, the Said Effects Conclude

Historical and Philological Commentary

  1. Numerological Closure ($13 = 1 + 12$) and Leonardo’s *:term:`Cenacolo <simulacro>`*: Pacioli brings Section 2 (Chapters VII–XXIII, the Thirteen Effects of the Divine Proportion) to a close by linking the number 13 to the 13 Articles of the Scholastic Apostles’ Creed and to Christ surrounded by the Twelve Apostles ($1 + 12 = 13$). In a masterstroke of courtly rhetoric, he ties this theological-mathematical structure directly back to Ludovico Sforza’s patronage of Leonardo da Vinci’s :term:`Last Supper <simulacro>` in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie (already praised in Chapters I and III), where Christ and the twelve Apostles form a visible thirteenfold harmonic composition before the viewer’s eyes.

Philological and Folio Apparatus

  • 1509 Paganini Witness Folios: 0030, 0031 (f. 7v–f. 8r)

  • Winterberg 1889 Italian Source: winterberg/01_divina_proportione_italian/023_cap_XXIII.txt

  • Winterberg 1889 German Source: winterberg/03_divina_proportione_german/023_cap_XXIII.txt

  • Marginal Woodcut Diagrams: 0 figure(s) extracted from the 1509 Venice witness.