Snowflakes and Fort Construction--Scamozzi & Palmanova

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 715

My apologies for the formatting problem below--Typepad again has struck with its incongruities. Again.  Did I mention "again"?)

Vincet Scamozzi, a gifted and powerful architect (and whose portrait appears, weirdly, disjointed and floating and entirely out of place in the frontispiece to his famous book, completely separated from the connectedness of his work) was also the designer of this gorgeous star “fort” at Palmanova, in northeastern Italy—mainly the Turks—but nothing ever threatened the place.  Until Napoleon, that is, who took the town without a flight in 1793. 

This is actually a plan for an entire town, the brainchild of its Venetian benefactors,  the very essence of which was fortification, repulse, security and defence. An 18th century  Maginot Circle, so to speak—it was a perfectly designed system for a fortified town for the time in which it was designed (1593).  It was supposed to stand to face the enemies of Venice I wonder if anyone derived inspiration in fort design from snowflakes?  It seems a little doubtful, perhaps, since snow wasn’t dealt with in scientific detail until the every busy Johannes Kepler wrote his treatise on the six-cornered snowflake; and it also wasn’t seen under a microscope in its fabulous detail until 1665 by Robert Hooke.  This was also about the time that modern canon tech was about to make these sorts of designs not terribly practical. [Just last week I mentioned that a fort on the island next to the island that my family vacations on, Tybee, just south of Savannah , is home to the first rifled canon attack on a stone fort—the result was brutal and definitive, the day of the fort was done. Until of course the tinny home fort was invented by the American federal government to protect hundreds of millions of people form devastating nuclear attacks by building steel and stone bunkers under a bit of earth in the backyard, making every person their own bit of royalty, reigning over one’s grave.  

But that’s another story. Kepler thought very deeply about snowflakes as a result of a serendipitous encounter with one—his sympathico correspondence with a snowflake on his coat led to him publishing (in 1611) a short treatise called A New Year’s Gift, or On the Six-Cornered Snowflake, thinking that perhaps the snowflake’s six-cornered symmetry revealed something much deeper about the basis of nature and the universe. He was racing himself towards a significance of the facultas formatrix, or morphogenetic field, and its relationship to everything else, as Kepler was looking for a great pattern, his own 17th century Grand Unified Theory. The 26-year-old  Robert Hooke seems to be recognized as the first to throw the snowflake under a microscope, publishing drawings of them and just about everything else that he saw in his monumental (and tall, being 13-inches high) Micrographia (1665)--the first truly scientific book of modern times.  The largest of the large images was saved for the flea, showing the unsuspecting public the great and beautiful nature of what seemed like a fantastical beast (under magnification).  Snowflakes appeared in the book, revealed in their intricate and seemingly-symmetrical nature.  They were fantastic, not-yet imagined images. In between these two giants was another--Rene Descartes--who was actually the first to render a relatively accurate pre-microscope image of a snowflake and did some very good thinking about their structure.]

Perhaps though it is the opposite, perhaps most of these pre-Renaissance Western European forts do bear resemblances to snowflakes, though without attribution.  (I just did a quick google search on some of the major writers on the construction of forts, and "snowflake" makes not one appearance.) Of course there is no mention of any biological acuity in ancient and near-ancient city plans that bear striking resemblences to human biological units.  I guess you really don't need to have any idea about on the subject of crystal growth or know what super-cooled cloud droplets look like in order to design something that looks like one...

Comments

[peacay]

"Despite his protests at other scientists copying his ideas, it appears that Hooke was not above plagiarism himself, as the writer Brian J. Ford has pointed out. At the top of Scheme VIII, a plate depicting ice crystals drawn from life, Hooke depicts a group of snowflakes [shown below]. Ford claims that these images were not in fact drawn by Hooke, but copied from a book by the Danish scientist Thomas Bartholin (1616-1680), entitled De Nivis usu Medico Observationes Variae, published four years earlier in 1661. These images were the first illustrations of snowflakes which appeared to present them in magnified form. However, as most of these images bear little resemblance to ice crystals in nature, they appear to be stylised caricatures or artistic impressions of what snowflakes might actually look like under magnification. As Ford observes, despite Hooke’s complaint that contemporaries frequently misappropriated his work, his silent adoption of Bartholin’s snowflakes in Micrographia suggests how unstable the concept of intellectual property was in the early modern world as well as the variety of second-hand materials that contributed to the authority of an‚ objective scientific investigation."
[Univ. of Reading librarian, 2008]

Sorry: search on a few words from that spiel for the source pdf link (for some reason I can't actually extract the link from the google results page).
I'm not saying I agree or disagree; merely that I'd come across it before.

ps. I love the snowflake--fort design idea, but alas, the 'correlation and causation' maxim always gets in the way of a good theory.

[John Ptak]

No, you're right, PK, about Hooke and his borrowing. Perhaps he thought he was "owed" one for all of the stuff that had been "borrowed" from him over the years--real and imaginary, there was quite a bit in that later category. I don't know why he got so heavy-handed and sticky-fingered with Bartholin, but he did. Somewhere in this blog I've actually addressed that issue, with a bit of sympathy I think; but now I can't remember. He was a forever-sick man, seemingly without friends outside of the coffee house, as big as a stick, with not a good public demeanor, and not pretty, and with no unpaid-for love life. I do recall that as important as the man was in England at this time, and for so many decades, there wasn't a portait of him painted from life. Perhaps he felt "owed" on this one. I've tried to feel some sympathy for thi sman, but it is a hard road.

[Ray Girvan]

Palmanova is an amazing structure. I was brought up in a fortified town - see http://segalbooks.blogspot.com/2009/08/fortifications.html - though I didn't remotely appreciate the history at the time. The Palmerston forts built in southern England from around 1860 (worries about French invasion) did attempt to adjust fort design and tactics to new weapons technology. Whether it would have worked is uncertain. The similarly-designed Belgian fortresses didn't significantly impede German advance in World War 1 (they were vulnerable to the latest heavy mortars) which was why the French didn't bother to much defend the also similar Verdun forts.

[John Ptak]

Fascinating story! Growing up in NYC/Staten Island I didn't get a great big taste of this sort of history, though if you looked hard enough (on SI) you could find the old Dutch history. The Battery, though, and stuff like it, are long gone.