Taccola

Mariano di Jacopo detto il Taccola (1382 – c. 1453), called Taccola ('Crow'), was an Italian administrator, artist and engineer of the early Renaissance. Taccola is known for his technological treatises De ingeneis and De machinis, which feature annotated drawings of a wide array of innovative machines and devices. Taccola’s work was widely studied and copied by later Renaissance engineers and artists, among them Francesco di Giorgio, and perhaps even Leonardo da Vinci.


Mariano Taccola was born in Siena in 1382. Practically nothing is known of his early years of training or apprenticeship.[2] As an adult, he pursued a varied career in Siena, working in such diverse jobs as notary, university secretary, sculptor, superintendent of roads and hydraulic engineer.[3] In the 1440s, Taccola retired from his official positions, receiving a pension from the state. He is known to have joined the fraternal order of San Jacomo by 1453 and presumably died around that date.Taccola left behind two treatises, the first being De ingeneis (Concerning engines), work on its four books starting as early as 1419.[5] Having been completed in 1433, Taccola continued to amend drawings and annotations to De ingeneis until about 1449. In the same year, Taccola published his second manuscript, De machinis(Concerning machines), in which he restated many of the devices from the long development process of his first treatise.


Drawn with black ink on paper and accompanied by hand-written annotations, Taccola depicts in his work a multitude of 'ingenious devices' in hydraulic engineering, milling, construction and war machinery. Taccola’s drawings show him to be a man of transition: While his subject matter is already that of later Renaissance artist-engineers, his method of representation still owns much to medieval manuscript illustration.[6] Notably, with perspective coming and going in his drawings, Taccola seemed to remain largely unaware of the ongoing revolution in perspective painting.[7] This is the more curious, since he is the only man known to have interviewed the 'father of linear perspectivity' himself, Filippo Brunelleschi.[4] Despite these graphic inconsistencies, Taccola’s style has been described as being forceful, authentic and usually to be relied upon to capture the essential.


Being named as the 'Sienese Archimedes', Taccola’s work stands at the beginning of the tradition of Italian Renaissance artist-engineers, with a growing interest in technological matters of all kinds. Taccola’s drawings were copied and served as source of inspiration by such as Buonacorso Ghiberti, Francesco di Giorgio, and perhaps even Leonardo da Vinci.[4] Special historical importance hold his drawings of the ingenious lifting devices and reversible-gear systems which Brunelleschi devised for the construction of the dome of the Florence cathedral,[9] at the time the second widest in the world.Taccola is also known for pioneering the keel breaker, a lever-based device designed to tear holes in the hull (keel) of a ship using its fork or spike.[10] Primarily used against pirates, though supposedly used by Mediterranean navies.[citation needed]Interest in Taccola’s work, however, practically ceased some time after his death until quite recently,[2] one reason perhaps being that his treatises only ever circulated as handcopied books, with at least three of them remaining extant today.[11] Taccola’s original manuscripts, whose style turned out to be more sophisticated than those of its copies, were rediscovered and identified in the state libraries of Munich and Florence only in the 1960s, giving impetus for the first printed editions of both De ingeneis and De machinis in subsequent years.

江湖 JIANG HU

SHOT ON Millennium Bridge by Leon

Salon: Public Occasion Agency Nov.03,2011

Villard de Honnecourt

Villard de Honnecourt (Wilars dehonecort, fol. 1v; Vilars de Honecourt, fol. 15v) was a 13th-century artist from Picardy in northern France. He is known to history only through a surviving portfolio of 33 sheets of parchment containing about 250 drawings dating from the 1220s/1240s, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (MS Fr 19093). The great variety of subjects (religious and secular figures suitable for sculpture, and architectural plans, elevations and details, ecclesiastical objects andmechanical devices, some with annotations), makes it difficult to determine its purpose. Other subjects such as animals and human figures also appear. 

 The traditional view, since the discovery of the portfolio in the mid-19th century, is that Villard was an itinerant architect/mason/builder, but there is no evidence of him ever working as an architect or in any other identifiable profession. None the less, it is clear from his drawings that he was interested in architecture and that he traveled to some of the major ecclesiastical building sites of his day to record details of these buildings. His drawing of one of the west facade towers of Laon Cathedral and those of radiating chapels and a main vessel bay, interior and exterior, of Reims Cathedral are of particular interest. 

 Villard tells us, with pride, that he had been in many lands (Jai este en m[u]lt de tieres) and that he made a trip to Hungary where he remained many days (maint ior), but he does not say why he went there or who sent him. It has recently been proposed that he may have been a lay agent or representative of the cathedral chapter ofCambrai Cathedral to obtain a relic of St. Elizabeth of Hungary who had made a donation to the cathedral chapter and to whom the chapter dedicated one of the radiating chapels in their new cathedral chevet. 

 Among the mechanical devices Villard sketched are a perpetual-motion machine, a water-driven saw, a number of automata, lifting devices, war engines (a trebuchet) as well as a number of anatomical and geometric sketches for portraiture and architecture. The claim that he drew a simple escapement mechanism, the first known in the West, is now questioned. 

 Villard's vast diversity in his sketchbook has caused him to be compared to such great minds as Leonardo Da Vinci, who also specialized in many different categories of art and science.

Jacques de Vaucanson

At just 18 years of age, Vaucanson was given his own workshop in Lyon, and a grant from a nobleman to construct a set of machines. In that same year of 1727, there was a visit from one of the governing heads of Les Minimes. Vaucanson decided to make some androids. The automatons would serve dinner and clear the tables for the visiting politicians. However one government official declared that he thought Vaucanson's tendencies "profane", and ordered that his workshop be destroyed.[2] 

In 1737, Vaucanson built The Flute Player, a life-size figure of a shepherd that played the tabor and the pipe and had a repertoire of twelve songs. The figure's fingers were not pliable enough to play the flute correctly, so Vaucanson had to glove the creation in skin. The following year, in early 1738, he presented his creation to the Académie des Sciences.[3] At the time, mechanical creatures were somewhat a fad inEurope, but most could be classified as toys, and de Vaucanson's creations were recognized as being revolutionary in their mechanical life-like sophistication.

 Later that year, he created two additional automatons, The Tambourine Player and The Digesting Duck, which is considered his masterpiece. The duck had over 400 moving parts in each wing alone, and could flap its wings, drink water, digest grain, and defecate.[4] Although Vaucanson's duck supposedly demonstrated digestion accurately, his duck actually contained a hidden compartment of "digested food", so that what the duck defecated was not the same as what it ate. Although such "frauds" were sometimes controversial, they were common enough because such scientific demonstrations needed to entertain the wealthy and powerful to attract their patronage. Vaucanson is credited as having invented the world's first flexible rubber tube while in the process of building the duck's intestines. Despite the revolutionary nature of his automatons, he is said to have tired quickly of his creations and sold them in 1743. 

His inventions brought him to the attention of Frederick II of Prussia, who sought to bring him to his court. Vaucanson refused, however, wishing to serve his own country.