In 15th-century Italy, an architect known as Filarete came up with a groundbreaking system for expelling odors from the latrines of a hospital he was designing in Milan.
Waste from the toilet rooms in the Ospedale Maggiore fell into water-fed subterranean channels directly below. A series of flues rose up through the hospital’s walls from those channels to the roof, where vents released noxious odors.
In the following century, this system of ventilation technology was reconceived for a military context. At the time, a military architect known as Antonio da Sangallo the Younger adapted that system of ventilated flues for use within the walls of the Bastione Ardeatino, an elaborate fortress constructed in Rome under Pope Paul III Farnese.
“One of the major challenges within fortress spaces was clearing out the smoke generated from firing cannons,” explained Morgan Ng, an assistant professor in Yale’s Department of the History of Art. “Efficient ventilation systems developed for hospital contexts could also be used to expel the toxic gunpowder fumes within these military contexts.”
That sort of cross-pollination of artistic, technical, and scientific creativity during the Italian Renaissance is the focus of Ng’s research. His new book, “Form and Fortification: The Art of Military Architecture in Renaissance Italy” (Yale University Press), explores how this exchange transformed military fortresses at a time when rulers had to adapt their defenses to the rising use of gunpowder in warfare.
“Some of the most cutting-edge defensive technologies arose thanks to the creative adaptations and translations of forms, technologies, and structures from other fields of design, such as urban design, garden planning, palaces, and even churches,” said Ng, who is also a trained architect.
He argues that this reprogramming of non-military technologies into military arenas — and vice versa — produced what he calls “cognate technologies,” or families of architectural structures and other designed artifacts that were deeply interconnected due to similar underlying structural arrangements, shared operative principles, and a common ancestry. His book illustrates the many underlying connections between military engineering and other forms of Renaissance architecture and landscape design, using a rich array of architectural drawings, photographs, maps, and drawings, many of which were newly discovered in archives and are being published for the first time.
Ng sat down with Yale News to talk about these connections, as revealed in the images paired below. His comments have been condensed and edited.
Ng: “What you see on the left here is an underground hydraulic tunnel with a clever serpentine or zigzagging channel that is designed to slow and control the flow of water from one place to another. These tunnels were used to nourish the life of a town. But the same forms could be adapted for use as underground enemy mines that could kill a population, as depicted in the 16th-century print on the right. Miners would dig a tunnel underneath a fortified town and lay an explosive charge to destroy the town from below. Military engineers gave the tunnel a zigzagging shape to slow the outflow of the explosion and so maximize its power. This exchange of forms wasn’t a coincidence — the same engineers or architects tasked with designing the water tunnels were often recruited during war time to dig explosive mines.”
Ng: “Garden and military contexts shared similar ways of sculpting and building landforms. In the figure on the left, you see an artificial hill in a garden designed to enable visitors to ascend a series of ramps up to a very high point, from which they could then enjoy a spectacular panorama of the surrounding landscape. As you can see on the right, the same forms could be found on the battlefield, enabling soldiers to ascend to an elevated position to surveil oncoming attackers. The soldiers could place cannons on the summit of these hills to fire at their enemies across a greater distance. The uses of artificial hills for war and pleasure sometimes even blurred. Landforms initially planned as artillery mounts were, during peacetime, often adapted as pleasure parks by the rich and famous.”
Ng: “Renaissance people drew analogies between different types of tubular technologies that were meant to shoot across a distance — the cannons on the left eject projectiles at precise angles just like fountains that spew jets of water at high pressure from metal tubes. And in a way, these two types of technologies relate surprisingly to things like telescopes, as on the right. Only in this case, instead of long-range shooting you have long-range seeing through a tube. Here, you also find military innovations crossing into civilian science and technology. When telescopes originated, one of their main functions was espionage. They later became used for scientific discovery.”
Ng: “The figure on the left shows how military architects cleverly sculpted the landscape in profile in very complex shapes for all kinds of precise defensive and structural functions. Certain surfaces could resist cannon fire. Channels could drain away rainwater so it didn’t damage defensive walls. Interestingly, one later designer decided that the same type of design could be adapted to create very effective fruit walls, as seen on the right. He argued that you could carve the landscape in a way such that certain surfaces would be more inclined toward the sun, thus maximizing the exposure of plants that were growing on those surfaces. You could also have channels that could capture rainwater for irrigation. One of the reasons people thought to adapt fortress forms for agrarian use is that during peacetime, everyday people took over military earthworks, planting their herbs and vegetables and fruits on the grassy surfaces. When they weren’t under siege, these fortresses were dynamic multifunctional spaces.”
Ng: “On the left we see an elevated defensive passageway that connects an urban stronghold to the pope’s fortified palace in the Vatican, at the northern edge of Rome. This allowed the pope to escape into or out of the city in a military emergency. This kind of defensive escape route was very popular in the Middle Ages. But as gunpower and cannons became the norm in the Renaissance, these escape routes were vulnerable to being battered by artillery. So you might expect these kinds of passages to have disappeared as they became obsolete for defense. But that didn’t happen. As we see on the right, technologies that became antiquated in military contexts could survive through creative adaptation. In this famous mid-16th-century example, the Vasari Corridor in Florence, an elevated corridor is now being used to connect an inner-city palace to a pleasure villa at the outskirts of town. The rulers would use this passageway as a private and efficient to get from one residence to another without mixing with the common people. It’s a Renaissance version of a helicopter.”
