Reviewed by Victoria Beard University of North Dakota
This twenty-five minute educational video documents the life and times of the Italian Renaissance mathematician Luca Pacioli, “Father of Accounting.” It was shot on location in Sansepolcro (Pacioli’s home town), Florence, Venice, and Milan, using authentic Renaissance costumes and props. It is the kind of audiovisual feast of art, music and scenery that we have come to expect in a documentary about Renaissance Italy.
Born in 1445 in a small town in Tuscany, young Luca Pacioli received his early religious and mercantile training from the local Franciscan monks. At sixteen, he eschewed the traditional trade apprenticeship for a series of educational associations which ultimately put him in touch with the great artistic and intellectual minds of Renaissance Italy: Piero della Francesca (painter, Latin scholar, poet, cosmographer, architect, mathematician), Duke Federico of Urbino (and his 4,000 volume library), Leon Battista Alberti (architect, artist, scientist, author), Pope Paul II (who convinced Pacioli to become a Franciscan monk), and Leonardo da Vinci. Pacioli’s collaboration with these artists and architects is wonderfully illustrated by the geometric proportions of Alberti’s facade of Santa Maria Novella in Florence and by the sophisticated perspective in Leonardo’s Last Supper.
This is not primarily a video about accounting or about the origins of Venetian (double-entry) bookkeeping. It is about the essence of the Renaissance, a time when “the mathematician gave proportion to the artist, and science fueled art,” a time when religion and education, mathematics and art, science and business were unencumbered by the closure of professionalism. That Pacioli repeatedly crossed over these professional borders with enthusiasm and curiosity is a particularly important mes-sage for today’s accounting students.
Pacioli placed such great importance on the practical, com-mercial application of mathematical theory that in 1494, when he published his Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (The Collected Knowledge of Arithmetic, Geometry, Proportions and Proportionality), it was in the vernacular Italian rather than Latin. Here, for the first time, is a complete description of double-entry bookkeeping, along with a compendium of common business sense, “a textbook for teachers, a manual for merchants.
This unique video is particularly appropriate for beginning accounting students, both at the high school and college levels. Throughout, the viewer remains comfortably involved in the narrative by way of repeated dissolves back and forth from the Renaissance reenactments to the modern-day announcer at the same location. That it is, in places, overly dramatic is easily forgivable.
