Prethodno priopćenje
https://doi.org/10.31664/ripu.2019.43.14
Faust Vrančić’s Design for the Siege of Ostend from the Year 1603
Danko Zelić
orcid.org/0000-0002-7302-6768
; Institut za povijest umjetnosti, Zagreb
Sažetak
In the early autumn of 1603, Faust Vrančić (Faustus Verantius, Fausto Veranzio) – at the time residing in the imperial capital of Prague, in the service of Emperor Rudolph II – made a design for the obstruction of maritime access to the port of Ostend and sent it to Archduke Albert VII, the commander of a considerable, 100,000-men army that had been unsuccessfully attacking the town of Ostend as of the summer of 1601. Since then the besieged town had been supplied with troops and victuals by sea and all the assailants’ efforts to cut off that vital communication had failed.
Albeit there is no evidence that Vrančić’s design had been taken into consideration, let alone that his machine had actually come into being at the battlefield, his project for Ostend, preserved in the Royal Archives of Belgium in Brussels, is in several respects an important testimony of his activity as inventor. Firstly, besides those presented in his book Machinae novae (Venice, 1615), it remains the only surviving drawing of any of his devices. Secondly, the design for Ostend is not a ‘conceptual’ invention, but a custom-made solution for a specific purpose and, thirdly, it was apparently developed on his own initiative.
Although designed to serve the besieging party, Vrančić’s device for Ostend is in fact a defensive war machine – a combination of two types of barriers for incoming enemy ships. The first one (in the upper part of the drawing) features longitudinal pointed wooden beams disposed in two rows with the aim of damaging and/or breaching ships’ hulls. Reinforced with iron, pointed tops of beams are tied to anchors, while their lower parts are fixed into the bottom of the channel/waterway. The posterior part of the device (in the lower part of the drawing) consists of three transversely disposed rows of shorter floating beams. Connected to each other with chains and anchored to the bottom, they were intended to block further movement of vessels.
In addition to that, the drawing also contains evidence of the evolution of the initial design or, more precisely, two phases of its elaboration. Adjustments regarding the length of chains and the shape of anchors are evident in annotations added by Vrančić himself. Unless his claim that it was the draughtsman (literally: pictor) who had failed is actually true, one can speculate that the modifications are due to the fact that the inventor subsequently gathered more precise information on the particular nature of the site. Thus the sandy sea bottom would be the reason why he opted for four-fluke instead of double-fluke anchors, whereas lengthier anchor chains were more appropriate with regard to considerable tidal range on that area of the North Sea coast.
Vrančić’s design is here being considered with regard to the works of his contemporary Pompeo Targone, the Roman engineer employed by the attacking party at Ostend. As a matter of fact, according to the earliest accounts of the siege, particularly the Dutch ones, Targone became notorious as inventor of some spectacular, yet completely unsuccessful war machines. Nevertheless, in spite of being deemed a typical drawing board engineer, i.e. one with no war experience, Targone had also designed some less-known machines in Ostend that had proven to be considerably efficient. At any rate, his fame in Rome was certainly not diminished by the bad reputation acquired in Flanders.
From 1605 onwards, both Faust Vrančić and Pompeo Targone lived in Rome and both of them endeavoured to propose the solution to prevent flooding of the Tiber River, a critical task that numerous engineers of the time were engaged with. While Targone, appointed by Pope Paul V as the chief engineer sopra le acque in 1607, was a professional in charge of the watercourses of Rome, it is less known that Vrančić had been working on the same hydraulic problem himself. Moreover, he decided that this project – termed Urbis Romae diluvium – would indeed be the first among those presented in his book of machines.
Attention should also be drawn to the fact that – although the commentaries accompanying his Machinae novae occasionally mention other contemporary machines and inventors – the only engineer Vrančić explicitly refers to (when explaining his own invention of the stone saw) is indeed Targone. However, despite certain further coincidences, in the concluding part of the paper it is argued that the evidence concerning inventors and inventorship in the early seventeenth century hardly suffices for the discussion of topics such as originality, innovativeness, or authorship. Considering the fact that they are tied to concepts developed at a later time, the very use of these terms would be anachronistic.
Ključne riječi
Faust Vrančić; siege of Ostend; war machines; seventeenth century; military engineering; inventions; Pompeo Targone
Hrčak ID:
233946
URI
Datum izdavanja:
31.12.2019.
Posjeta: 1.253 *