Posts Tagged ‘Scamozzi’
“It is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity– the construction of fortifications, for instance”*…
From Public Domain Review, a look at a 17th century book that collects (beautiful) plans for forts and fortifications…
What is the peculiar appeal of military architecture? Whether Norman castle or Cold War concrete, there is a kind of sublimity that belongs to defensive design. It stems obviously from the massive scale of construction, and from the luxury of uncompromised execution that generous defence budgets afford. But there is also pleasure to be taken in the unornamented purity of style of structures that have been built solely for practical ends.
These qualities are abundant in the work of the seventeenth-century French military engineer Allain Manesson Mallet. Born in Paris in 1630, Manesson studied mathematics before becoming a soldier (he added the name Mallet in tribute to his teacher). In 1663, he was posted to Alentejo as an army engineer in the service of the Portuguese king Alfonso VI, where he fortified chateaux, until the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668. He returned to France with an appointment as mathematics instructor at the court of Louis XIV.
He recorded his military ideas in a highly successful manual, The Works of Mars (i.e. “the art of war”) in 1671. A year later came German and Dutch editions (the source of the images above), even though France was by then at war with the Netherlands.
Manesson’s book encompassed theories of fortifications from their origins in designs developed in the sixteenth century by Michelangelo and the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi, including more recent innovations of French and Dutch engineers….
More– and many more renderings of ramparts: “The Works of Mars” from @PublicDomainRev.
* W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
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As we build bastions, we might understand the Dutch interest in Manesson’s manual as we recall that it was on this date in 1602 that the Spanish-held city of Grave in the Netherlands was taken, at the end of a two-month siege, by a Dutch and English army led by Maurice of Orange and Francis Vere respectively.
Part of the Eighty Years’ War and the Anglo–Spanish War, the Siege of Grave and its ultimate fall were severe enough to cause a major mutiny in the Spanish army.
Gimme a break, gimme a break…
The earliest ancestor of the Kit Kat Bar was born in 1935, when a worker at the Rowntree’s factory in York suggested a snack that “a man could have in his lunch box for work.” It was launched in September 1935 in the UK as Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp (price: 2 pence). The two-finger version was launched on May 15, 1936, then renamed “Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp” in 1937; after World War II, it became simply “Kit Kat.” The name is thought to be a nod to the Kit-Cat Club, an eighteenth-century Whig literary club:
As the building had very low ceilings, it could accommodate only paintings which were wide but not too high. In the art world, such paintings became known as ‘kitkats’. It is therefore conceivable that the humble KIT KAT derived its name from paintings which has to be snapped off to fit into low-ceilinged rooms. [source]
In any case, while the versions sold in the UK and the US remain true to its milk chocolate-cover wafer heritage, Kit Kats sold elsewhere in the world have… well, adopted local coloration. “Fried Toast” (a young native of Washington State now living in Japan) has created a Flickr pool that’s a veritable field guide to Kit Kats around the globe: Kit Kats of the World.
Consider, for example, the Muscat Kit Kat…
Or the French Salt Kit Kat…
Oh so many more, here.
As contemplate cultural inclinations in confectionery, we might that it was on this date in 1585 that The Olympic Theatre was inaugurated in Vicenza. The final masterpiece of Andrea Palladio, the Renaissance disciple of Vitruvius and surely the most influential individual in the history of Western architecture, the theater opened with a production of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. The trompe-l’œil onstage scenery, designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi to give the appearance of long streets receding to a distant horizon, was installed in 1585 for that first performance, and is the oldest stage set still in existence.
The stage of the Olympic Theatre
Detail: Scamozzi’s scenery viewed through the central arch
UPDATE: Readers who enjoyed the amusing headlines featured in “All the News, Regardless of Fit” might appreciate this (N altogether SFW) post at HuffPo… and the Twitter stream at The Media is Dying.
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