Limited edition & Golden Ratio
It is Luca Pacioli’s and Leonardo da Vinci’s famous book De Divina Proportione (About the divine proportions) why we decided for this number. The book, written by Pacioli and illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci between 1496 and 1498, consists of three individual manuscripts and its first part, Compendio Divina Proportione, contains detailed studies on Golden ratio.
Due to its unique and interesting properties (in mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one), the golden ratio has fascinated intellectuals of diverse interests for at least 2.400 years.
Among them was also Leonardo da Vinci, who is the most prominent and well known user of the Golden Rectangle in art (as he noted: "Proportion is found in numbers and measures, but even in sounds, weights, time, and places, and to every possible degree" - K 49r). Everybody knows the Leonardo's famous study of the proportions of man called "The Vetruvian Man”.
In his study Franco Rocco established that the chess pieces drawn in De ludo scachorum manuscript are also proportioned on the basis of the Golden Ratio. It is the "the divine left hand," as Luca Pacioli designates it in his introduction to De Divina Proporzione, with which, with extreme precision and elegance, in the rapid drawing of the contours and expert spread of colour, Leonardo positioned the pieces on the chessboard in order to illustrate all the problems of the game.
