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Article ID: CBB001213048

Portraiture and Arithmetic in Sixteenth-Century Bavaria: Deciphering Barthel Beham's Calculator (2013)

Buskirk, Jessica (Author)

Renaissance Quarterly
Volume: 66, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 35-80

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Calculating machines Portraits Mathematics Arithmetic Science and art Renaissance 16th century Vienna (Austria)

In his portrait of an unidentified man (Vienna, 1529), Barthel Beham portrays the sitter paused in the midst of a math problem. As has been discovered, the numbers and symbols belong to the vocabulary of numerical calculation. This finding first raises the question of why a patron would want to be shown doing computation with Arabic numerals in a portrait. In 1529, numerical calculation was a commercial tool, not a field with humanistic/social cachet such as geometry. Further, the depicted computation does not make sense: the symbols and numbers are arranged in the form of a problem without actually being one. Yet the patron either did not notice or care. This article argues that the incomplete computation is not only a reflection of the contemporary status of mathematics using Arabic numbers, but also provides a way of understanding how the painting functioned as a portrait in the social milieu of the sixteenth-century Munich court.[ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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