Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 232, Trattato delle proportioni et proportionalità by Benedetto Varchi. This manuscript was written in Italian in Florence, Italy, after 1539. It is a treatise by Benedetto Varchi on proportion as the basis for rithmomachia, a mathematical game played on a chessboard with pieces that each have a shape and a number; a dialogue written by Carlo di Ruberto Strozzi, in which Cosimo Rucellai, who introduced the game to Benedetto Varchi, teaches the rules to Strozzi and Jacopo di Piero Vettori.

You can see the full online facsimile of this work in Penn in Hand and you can download all of the images and metadata from OPenn. You can also download a copy of this video from ScholarlyCommons, the University of Pennsylvania’s open access institutional repository.