Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus di Piero della Francesca

The National Critical Edition of the writings of Piero della Francesca starts with the treatise on geometry Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus, the first in the world dedicated entirely to this fundamental text by the great artist from Borgo San Sepolcro.

      The Libellus, written by Piero della Francesca after the Trattato d'Abaco and De Prospectiva pingendi (both forthcoming       publications), was the first treatise on geometry of the Renaissance in which problems relating to the construction and       calculation of polyhedrons, which had never before been drawn in stereometric form, were developed.

      The treatise, which has survived as a single manuscript, the Vaticano Urbinate Latino 632 codex, compiled by an unknown       author but accompanied by drawings, corrections and additions made by Piero himself, was dedicated to Guidubaldo da       Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. This work was known from the beginning of the sixteenth century, not as belonging to Piero,       and not even in Latin but as part of the Divina Proportione by Fra Luca Pacioli, who published it in Italian as his own work.       The plagiarism was denounced by Giorgio Vasari and has been the object of heated dispute ever since.

      This new and extraordinary publication was produced with the aid of sophisticated scientific and philological instruments       and edited by a prestigious scientific commission composed of Cecil Grayson, Marisa Dalai Emiliani and Carlo Maccagni. It       goes beyond a mere reconstruction of Piero della Francesca's original text examining particularly the comparison between       Piero della Francesca's text and that of some sections of the Divina Proportione by Luca Pacioli (from the codex preserved       in the National Library in Florence).

      A half-leather box (size 260 x 360 mm) contains a 176-page facsimile of the Vaticano Urbinate Latino 632 codex, a       volume of XLIV-216 pages with a critical edition of the Latin text accompanied by the Italian version by Luca Pacioli,       and a volume of XXII-224 pages with a critical edition of the drawings.

      Facsimile edition of 998 numbered copies for the whole world.

The Libellus was the first treatise on geometry of the Renaissance in which problems relating to the construction and calculation of polyhedrons, which had never before been drawn in stereometric form, were developed