This portrait of Fra Pacioli probably was painted by Jacopo Barbari (Leonardo Da Vinci's Teacher) in about 1495. Barbari was a painter-printmaker from Venice and a close student of human proportions. His monograph was the mystical caduceus. He knew Giovanni Bellini in Venice and Albrecht Durer during and after Durer’s visits to Venice. Pacioli is shown illustrating a theorem of Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician who is considered the “Father of Geometry.” On the table are tools of his trade. Placed on a book is a geometric object Pacioli used to teach both math and metaphysics. It is a dodecahedron, a regular polyhedron that has 12 flat pentagonal faces. This geometric form, the 5th of the 5 traditional “Platonic Solids,” was to Plato and to Pacioli symbolic of the so-called “quintessence” – the unqualified, infinite Ether from which derives all that is material, that is to say, all that is qualified into specific forms so as to be perceivable inside the sphere of space and time. The identity of the student standing beside Pacioli is uncertain. Some think it may be Durer, the German genius who brought the art of Renaissance proportions from Northern Italy to Northern Europe. (FLG)