Suchergebnisse

Nel 1530 Malta offriva pochi siti naturali che si davano prontamente alla fondazione di una piazzaforte che accoglieva gli obblighi navali dell'Ordine Militare di San Giovanni. Tra questi, il sito più adatto era il Monte Sceberras, una penisola fiancheggiata da due porti eccellenti. La città fortificata di La Valletta che sorgeva nel 1566 su progetto dell'ingegnere Francesco Laparelli trasformò questo sito in una formidabile fortezza che venne lodata come modello di architettura militare. Nei due secoli seguenti, diversi ingegneri furono reclutati dai Cavalieri a mantenere e sviluppare il sistema di fortifcazioni della città. Questo breve saggio traccia le fasi principali nello sviluppo delle fortificazioni di La Valletta fino al 1798. ; In 1530 Malta offered few natural sites that gave themselves readily to the founding of a piazzaforte capable of accommodating the naval obligations of the Military Order of St. John. Amongst these, the most suitable location was Mount Sceberras, a peninsula flanked by two excellent ports. The fortified city of Valletta which sprang up to the design of the papal military engineer Francesco Laparelli in 1566 transformed the site into a formidable fortress that came to be applauded as a model of military architecture. In the following two centuries, several engineers were recruited by the Knights to maintain and develop its system of fortifications. This brief paper charts the salient phases in the development of Valletta's fortifications until 1798. ; peer-reviewed

In terms of Hospitaller fortifications, one of the most exciting archival discoveries to take place in Malta in the past few years has been, undeniably, the unearthing of a plan depicting a breath-taking scheme for the re-fortification of Mdina in the mideighteenth century. (Fig. 1) This important document came to light in the archives of the Augustinian Priory in Rabat, in course of an exercise undertaken by the National Archives which had set out to document the various archives in Malta. Eventually, its discovery was brought to the attention of the present author by The National Archives and this article is a preliminary evaluation of the significance of the plan's contents from a military architecture point of view. ; peer-reviewed

The mid-eighteenth century was an important and frantic period in the military administration of the Hospitaller knights of St John. The 1750s and 1760s, in particular, saw massive efforts directed towards the reorganization and upgrading of the Order's military equipment and its storage facilities. Chief amongst these undertakings was the introduction of a much needed restructuring of the knights' armouries and of their ordnance department. In particular, a massive purchase of weapons, begun in 1759, involving an armaments deal with the weapons-manufacturing firm of St Etienne en Forest, in France, for the supply of 20,000 infantry muskets, 700 pairs of Pistolets d'Arcon (cavalry pistols), 700 pairs of boarding pistols, sabres and 'gros trombons à fourchette', was not only meant to upgrade the then-existing quality of the Order's equipment, as well as create an adequate reserve of serviceable weapons, but it was also meant to introduce a much needed degree of standardization. By the late 1760s, the Order of St. John could muster a force of some 18,000 men and hundreds of cannon with which to defend some 25 km of bastioned ramparts and scores of coastal defences. Rationalizing the logistics underpinning this growing organization had become a serious priority. One individual who was directly involved in much of this rearmament programme was the Portuguese Knight Fra Raimondo de Souza (Sousa) da Silva, Balì di Lessa and Langone, 'Gran Croce della ven.da Lingua di Castiglia e Portugallo' and member of the Congregation of War and Fortification, the main body responsible for directing and overseeing all the defence preparations of the Maltese islands. In 1769, Balì de Souza was instrumental in reviewing the storage facilities and state of equipment in the Order's armouries. In his report Balì de Souza mentioned some 24,000 muskets 'in pessimo stato per la ruggine', a large number of which were 'totalmente inservibili' and practically useless, particularly those earmarked for use by the militia. At the time, the master armourer had estimated that these thousands of unserviceable firearms required the employment of at least a hundred forzati, or gente di ciurma, if they were to be repaired in a reasonable period of time. ; peer-reviewed

Until only a few decades ago, many of the structures which today form the focus of so much attention were not even considered 'cultural' enough or worthy of both study and preservation. As late as 1977, J. R. Hale, the renowned renaissance fortification historian, could still write that 'in the main stream of architectural history, fortifications [were] accorded but a fitful or embarrassed attention'. Fortunately, however, the situation has changed over the past years and there is now no denying the fact that interest in historical castles and fortifications has increased significantly. A cursory search on the internet is enough to reveal the myriad of papers, articles, books and dedicated journals that are published each year on this subject and the extensive number of websites and organizations that have sprung up all around the world to promote the conservation, restoration, and interpretation of historic forts and fortifications. The last few decades have also seen hundreds of defensive works being restored and opened up to the public across the world, attracting an ever-increasing and discerning class of visitors intent on experiencing and exploring these intriguing monuments from the past. ; peer-reviewed

The pre-nineteenth century chroniclers and war artists had only their eyes and brushes and pens to capture, record and convey the details and narrative of battle. The skills required to portray the complexities and pictorial challenges of the battlefield – be it in the form of Egyptian tomb paintings, Sumerian steles, Assyrian bas reliefs, Greek temple paintings, Roman mosaics, or the tapestries, frescoes, and oil paintings of the Renaissance and later artistic periods – placed special demands on an artist's abilities and ingenuity that were not exerted by other pictorial subject matters; difficulties which increased considerably with the changing nature and growing scale of competing armies and the new technologies of warfare along the centuries. As the small scale wars of antiquity, fought at close quarters with swords, lances, and cavalry charges gave way to gunpowder weaponry and large professional standing armies, the scale of the battlefield expanded and the emphasis shifted from the heroic deeds of elite warriors to the mass formation of huge disciplined bodies of men fighting as automata in a large war machine. The introduction of firearms, and the resultant 'exchange of musketry volleys and artillery across open country' increased not only the distance between the belligerents but also, as a result, the compositional difficulties for the artists in their attempts to capture the military action on paper or canvas. By the mid-sixteenth century, artists in Italy had developed an approach to the portrayal of battle scenes which 'elevated painterly qualities over narratives that simply described specific historical moments' in the fighting, inspired by the northern artists like the German painter Albrecht Altdorfer and his The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529) who first experimented with this technique. Termed as the 'battles without heroes', these compositions were intended to capture the reality of fighting as well as the geography of the battlefield. This descriptive form of depiction eventually led to a formal convention described as the 'mapping of battle' before spilling over into the more 'naturalistic' representations of battles found in the seventeenth-century paintings of Adam Francois Van der Meulen and other painters. 4 Among the formal devices that became the staple convention in the depiction of such scenes was the bird's eye view. This form of representation made the viewer an 'omniscient observer of the event' and allowed for the portrayal of accurate panoramas of the battlefields. ; peer-reviewed

Few places around the shores of the Mediterranean can better attest to the adage that 'fortifications are a direct product of geography' than the stone-built defences of the Maltese Islands, erected by the Hospitaller Knights of the Order of St. John in the period 1530-1798. Indeed, three observations stand out from a study of the Maltese Islands and their long process of fortification, namely: (i) the strategic importance of the geographical position of Malta in the centre of the Mediterranean Sea and the leading role it was to play in shaping the history of the region, (ii) the Islands' harbours which provided a safe all-weather anchorage ideal for protecting large naval fleets and (iii) the lithic nature of the massive fortifications which were erected to defend these harbours and the rest of the islands from sea-borne attack and invasion. ; peer-reviewed

Professor Denis De Lucca's pioneering research work over the past number of years has served to challenge the notion that the design of fortifications, particularly during the age of Baroque, was restricted solely to military circles. His seminal work on the role of the Society of Jesus, otherwise known as the Jesuits, in spreading knowledge about fortifications and military architecture, entitled 'Jesuits and Fortifications: The Contribution of the Jesuits to Military Architecture in the Baroque Age' and published by Brill in 2012, however, drew attention to the manner in which a very influential religious institution used its educational faculties to teach the subject of fortification to the nobles of Europe while its learned members published treatises on fortification theory and even provided consultancies on the subject to warring princes. ; N/A

Building fortifications and preparing for war has always demanded a good deal of planning. From around the sixteenth century onwards, a large part of the military engineers' planning efforts came to be increasingly invested in acquiring an understanding of the landscape in order to ensure the most efficient exploitation of its features. To this end, meticulous scientific surveying and the creation of detailed maps and plans became a sine qua non of all military endeavours, critical in both in the implementation of defensive schemes as well as in the preparation of offensive campaigns. ; N/A

Book review of: Cities at War in Early Modern Europe. By Martha Pollak. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. ISBN 052111344X ; ISBN-13: 9780521113441 This publication focuses on how urban design and its spatial and visual ordering were influenced by the continual threat of war - how monarchs, princes and planners engineered the militarization of urban spaces and refashioned civic life with their bastioned star-shaped enceintes and citadels, massive esplanades and glacis, barracks, and parade grounds, in order to prepare the city for war. ; peer-reviewed

Illustrated Glossary of Terms used in Military Architecture compiled by Dr. Stephen C Spiteri. ; peer-reviewed

One of the least understood of all the works of fortification to have stood watch over the Maltese islands in antiquity is the castellu di la chitati - the medieval castle of the old town of Mdina. The arcanum that surrounds this ancient stronghold stems primarily from the fact that it was dismantled way back in the 15th century and what little had remained of the building thereafter, eventually disappeared altogether in the metamorphosis that accompanied the Hospitaller refortification of the medieval town into a gunpowder fortress throughout the course of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. This, coupled with the limited nature of contemporary documentary information has ensured that the true form and features of the medieval stronghold have been lost to the point that now only archaeology can hope to really figure out. Whilst acknowledging the severe limitations imposed by any approach that falls short of a full archaeological investigation, this paper seeks to re-examine the existing documentary, cartographic and physical evidence unearthed to-date in order to suggest a rudimentary model of Mdina's medieval stronghold. Undoubtedly, the greatest contribution to-date to the study of Mdina and its medieval fortifications has been the masterly work of Prof. Stanley Fiorini and Dr. Mario Buhagiar. This paper only undertakes to re-evaluate the evidence and some of the conclusions presented so far in the light of my own research into medieval military architecture and castle typologies. ; peer-reviewed

The new Fortifications Interpretation Centre is the new use assigned to the 16th century Hospitaller warehouse in Valletta. The project started out at a time when the main fortifications in Malta, namely those of Valletta, Birgu, Mdina and Cittadella (Gozo) started to be restored under the partly financed European Regional Development Fund (Operational Programme I) by the Restoration Directorate within the Ministry for Resources and Rural Affairs. The Fortress Builders FIC was a €2,100,000 project undertaken by the same Restoration Directorate and also granted European Union part funding under the same ERDF programme, with a co-funding rate of 85% EU Funds and 15% National Funds. The building was chosen largely for its vast interior spaces and its location which provides direct access to Valletta's ramparts. The need to transmit to the public that which is Malta's patrimony of forts and fortifications was met through the rehabilitation of an unused and abandoned building. The centre is hosted in St. Mark's Street, Valletta on one of the main entry routes into the city providing direct access to Valletta's ramparts. Its vicinity to St. Andrew's Bastion places it on an important access route into Valletta and more over, provides direct immediate access to Valletta's main bastioned enceinte, providing excellent panoramic views of the fortifications inside Marsamxett Harbour, namely Fort Manoel, Fort Tigné and the sea walls along the northern flank of the city itself. The building is a 16th century warehouse adjoining St. Andrew's Bastion located next to the Marsamxett Gate (no longer standing) which is one of the three main gateways into Valletta. It was built for the storage of merchandise off-loaded from the ships and other vessels berthed in Marsamxett harbour. Its location close to the Falconeria (a building that was used as reserve armoury from the mid-1700s onwards) also suggests some form of military use. The project involved reconstruction works, alteration works, new construction works, interior and exterior restoration works of the masonry building fabric (both walls and floors), restoration of original timber apertures, the installation of new timber apertures, finishing works, the introduction of power generating photovoltaic cells, rainwater collection and reuse, restoration and reuse of original passive ventilation systems, furnishing works, exhibition design and exhibition content formulation – panels, physical models and virtual representations. ; peer-reviewed