Arithmetic

(Giovanni Battista Ramenghi The Younger)

The son of the famous painter Bartolomeo, Giovanni Battista was born in Bologna in 1521and he died there in 1601. He trained with his father and visited local painters, but the key step in his development was a visit to Fontainebleau where he worked on designs for the palace with the famous mannerist painter, Primaticcio, particularly in the Grotta del Giardino dei Pini (the so-called cave of the pine garden). Returning to Rome c. 1545 he worked with Vasari at Palazzo della Cancelleria, in 1546, and on the decorations of Sala dei Cento Giorni. Progressively Ramenghi was forced to abandon elements of his mannerist style and conform to the norms of the Counter Reformation particularly in religious art. In Bologna he followed the style of Cesi and Calvaert becoming closer in style to Fontana but he was one of the few contemporary artists who resisted the new developments of the Carracci and their Accademia degli Incamminati in his latter years.

The town of Bagnacavallo holds several works by the artis namely L’incredulità di San Tommaso in the church of San Girolamo; the Pala del Rosario in the first chapel on the right of the Carmine and the La Sacra Conversazione with SS. Domenic and Catherine of Siena which is displayed in the local art collection of the town museum ‘Le Cappuccine’.

Ramenghi’s composition denoting Arithmetic shares certain characteristics with a Frans Floris of the same subject dateable to c.1555, now in The Louvre Abu Dhabi for which there is also a print by Floris. It seems probable that since the Ramenghi composition shows the hallmarks of Primaticcio that this precedes the Floris and that the two artists met in Rome in the 1550s.

Modern methods for four fundamental operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) were first devised by Brahmagupta of India but The earliest evidence of written mathematics dates back to the ancient Sumerians, who built the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia. They developed a complex system of metrology from 3000 BC. One of the earliest known mathematicians was Thales of Miletus (c. 624–c. 546 BC); he has been hailed as the first true mathematician and the first known individual to whom a mathematical discovery has been attributed. The Hindu–Arabic numeral system and the rules for the use of its operations, in use throughout the world today, evolved over the course of the first millennium AD in India and were transmitted to the Western world via Islamic mathematics. During the Golden Age of Islam, especially during the 9th and 10th centuries, mathematics saw many important innovations building on Greek mathematics. The most notable achievement of Islamic mathematics was the development of algebra. Other notable achievements of the Islamic period are advances in spherical trigonometry and the addition of the decimal point to the Arabic numeral system.[29][30] Many notable mathematicians from this period were Persian, such as Al-Khwarismi, Omar Khayyam and Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī.

V0007497 Three men read while a woman writes numerals; representing a
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
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Three men read while a woman writes numerals; representing arithmetic. Engraving by C. Cort, 1565, after F. Floris, c. 1557.
1565 By: Frans Florisafter: Cornelis CortPublished: –
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