Leonardo da Vincis friend Luca Pacioli is considered to be the father of accounting, but could the old Franciscan friar have left behind some tantalizing clues in his 1494 book that would predict the future of accounting as we now know it more than five centuries later?
Paciolis Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (Everything about Arithmetic, Geometry and Proportion) contains 36 chapters on bookkeeping, entitled De Computis et Scripturis (Of Reckonings and Writings) covering subjects as diverse as debits and credits, trial balances, assets, liabilities, income and expense accounts.
But could those 36 chapters eerily foreshadow
Pacioli first met Da Vinci while he was teaching in 1497 at the court of the Duke of Milan. Pacioli taught Da Vinci about the laws of perspective and proportion, and Da Vinci illustrated Paciolis manuscript De Divina Proportione (Of Divine Proportions), which helped Da Vinci fashion some of his masterpieces, including The Last Supper, where he depicted a table with 13 guests. Could this have corresponded to the 15 members of the IASB, minus two (Da Vinci and Pacioli)? Perhaps future historians and symbologists will be able to tell us the answers.
A painting that we have of Pacioli attributed to Jacopo de Barbari shows him standing at a table filled with geometrical tools and models, including a rhombicubotahedron half-filled with water. Da Vinci illustrated the rhombicubotahedron as one of the pictures in De Divina Proportione, one of the earliest books printed after Gutenberg fashioned his printing press with movable type.
The geometrical shape has been described as an Archimedean solid with eight triangular and 18 square faces. Could this correspond with
When Louis XII of France invaded Milan in 1499, forcing Pacioli and Da Vinci to flee from the dukes court, Paciolis outstanding debts too must have needed to be restructured.
Pacioli was called to Rome by Pope Leo III in 1514 to become a teacher and is thought to have died three years later in a monastery in Sansepolcro. While there, perhaps he also originated some of the accounting standards we know today. His friend Leonardo died two years later after completing the Mona Lisa and many other famous works.
Scholars have wondered for centuries what the mysterious subject of the painting, also known as La Gioconda, was smiling about. Could it have been about the accounting techniques imparted by Leonardos friend Pacioli? Perhaps one day we will learn the answers, but only after the convergence of accounting standards is complete.