Guido da Vigevano
Encyclopedia
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
physician and inventor. He is notable for his sketchbook Texaurus regis Francie which depicts a number of technological items and ingenious devices, allowing modern scholarship an invaluable insight into the state of medieval technology
Medieval technology
Medieval technology refers to the technology used in medieval Europe under Christian rule. After the Renaissance of the 12th century, medieval Europe saw a radical change in the rate of new inventions, innovations in the ways of managing traditional means of production, and economic growth...
. Although still attached in style and spirit to the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
, Guido da Vigevano can be regarded as a distant forerunner of later Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
artist-engineers like Taccola
Taccola
Mariano di Jacopo detto il Taccola , called Taccola , 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...
, Francesco di Giorgio
Francesco di Giorgio
Francesco di Giorgio Martini was an Italian painter of the Sienese School and a sculptor, as well as being, in Nikolaus Pevsner's terms, "one of the most interesting later Quattrocento architects'" and a visionary architectural theorist; as a military engineer he executed architectural designs and...
and Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
.
Guido da Vigevano was personal physician of queen Joan I of Navarre
Joan I of Navarre
Joan I , the daughter of king Henry I of Navarre and Blanche of Artois, reigned as queen regnant of Navarre and also served as queen consort of France.-Life:...
. For an envisaged crusade, he drew sketches of armoured chariots, wind-propelled carriages and siege engines. He was also one of the first to add drawings of organs to his anatomical descriptions. His sketches were typically medieval in that they lack perspectivity
Perspective (graphical)
Perspective in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface , of an image as it is seen by the eye...
, invented only at the beginning of the Renaissance by Brunelleschi
Filippo Brunelleschi
Filippo Brunelleschi was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. He is perhaps most famous for inventing linear perspective and designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, but his accomplishments also included bronze artwork, architecture , mathematics,...
.
Guido created a vehicle that moved using a windmill that relayed force to gear and then to the wheels. Some consider this machine to be first car in history, or at least a forerunner.
Further reading
- Hall, Bert Stewart: "Guido da Vigevano's Texaurus Regis Francie, 1335", in: Eamon, William (Ed.), Studies on Medieval Fachliteratur, Brussels 1982, pp. 33–44
- Hall, Bert Stewart, Giovanni de Dondi and Guido da Vigevano: "Notes Toward a Typology of Medieval Technological Writings", Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (1978), pp. 127–142
- Hall, Alfred Rupert: "Guido's Texaurus, 1335", in: Hall, Bert Stewart / West, Delno C. (Eds.): On Pre-Modern Technology and Science (Undena Publications), Malibu 1976, pp. 11–51
- Hall, Alfred Rupert: "The military inventions of Guido da Vigevano", Actes du Congrès International d'Histoire des Sciences, 8, Vol. 3 (1956), pp. 966–969
See also
- Medieval technologyMedieval technologyMedieval technology refers to the technology used in medieval Europe under Christian rule. After the Renaissance of the 12th century, medieval Europe saw a radical change in the rate of new inventions, innovations in the ways of managing traditional means of production, and economic growth...
- Villard de HonnecourtVillard de HonnecourtVillard de Honnecourt 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...
- TaccolaTaccolaMariano di Jacopo detto il Taccola , called Taccola , 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...
- Francesco di Giorgio Martini
- Leonardo da VinciLeonardo da VinciLeonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...