Talk:Fausto Veranzio

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Fausto Veranzio[1] (circa 1551 – January 17, 1617) was a polymath and bishop. [2]

Fausto was born in Sibenik (or Sebenico)

He was a member of the noble family of counts Veranzio or conti Verantii (a branch of which later merged with Draganich family, creating the Counts Draganich-Veranzio), a notable family of writers.

He was the son of Michele Veranzio, a Latin poet, and the nephew of Antun Vrancic/Antonio, archbishop of Esztergom (1504–1573), a diplomat and a civil servant.

While the family's main residence was in city of Sibenik, they owned a big summer house on island Prvic, in place Sepurine, a neighboring place to Prvic Luka (where he is buried in local church). The baroque castle that was used by Vrancic family as summer residence is now in possession of family Draganic.

Education and political activities

As a youth, Veranzio was interested in science. Still a child, he moved to Venice, where he attended schools, and then to Padua to join the University of Padua, where he focused on law, physics, engineering and mechanics.

At the court of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor/King Rudolf II, in Hradcany Castle, in Prague, Veranzio was chancellor for Hungary and Transylvania often in contact with Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe. After his wife's death, Veranzio left for Hungary. In 1598, he got the title of Episcŏpus Csanadiensis. In 1609, back in Venice, he joined the brotherhood of Paul of Tarsus/Saint Paul of Tarsus and committed himself to the study of science. Veranzio died in 1617 in Venice and was buried in Dalmatia, near his family's countryhouse.

Polymath and inventor

Veranzio's masterwork, Machinae Novae (Venice 1595), contained 49 large pictures depicting 56 different machines, tools/devices, and technical concepts.

Two variants of this work exist, one with the "Declaratio" in Latin and Italian, the other with the addition of three other languages. Only a few copies survived and often do not present a complete text in all the five languages. This book was written in Italian, Spanish, French and German.

The tables represent a varied set of projects, inventions and creations of the author. There Veranzio wrote about water and solar energy, the universal clock (Plates 6–7), several types of mills, agricultural machinery, various types of bridge in various materials, machinery for clearing the sea, a dual sedan traveling on mule (Plate 47), special coaches, and Homo Volans (Plate 38) a forerunner of the parachute. His work included a portable boat (Plate 39), that is say a boat that, thanks to the same energy as the current may go against the river (Plate 40). It was his idea to use the printing rotary principle (e.g. grinding them printers, Plate 46) in order to alleviate the great difficulty of printers and improve results.

Veranzio's parachute

One of the illustrations in Machinae Novae is a sketch of a parachute dubbed Homo Volans ("The Flying Man"). Having examined Leonardo da Vinci's rough Sketch of a parachute, Veranzio designed a parachute of his own.[3][4]

He is considered the first man to build and test a parachute: in 1617, now over sixty-five years old, he implemented his design and tested the parachute by jumping from St Mark's Campanile in Venice.[5] This event was documented some 30 years after it happened in a book[6] written by John Wilkins, the secretary of the Royal Society in London.

Mills

His areas of interest in engineering and mechanics were broad. Mills were one of his main point of research, where he created 18 different designs. He envisioned windmills with both vertical and horizontal Axis of rotation/axes, with different wing constructions to improve their efficiency. The idea of a mill powered by tides incorporated accumulation pools filled with water by the high tide and emptied when the tide ebbed, simply using gravity; the concept has just recently been engineered and used.

Urbanist and engineer in Rome and Venice

By order of the Pope, he spent two years in Rome where he envisioned and made projects needed for regulating rivers, since Rome was often flooded by the Tiber river.[7] He also tackled the problem of the wells and water supply of Venice, which is surrounded by sea.[7] Devices to register the time using water, fire, or other methods were envisioned and materialized. His own sun clock was effective in reading the time, date, and month, but functioned only in the middle of the day.

The construction method of building metal bridges and the mechanics of the forces in the area of statics were also part of his research. He drew proposals which predated the actual construction of modern suspension bridges and cable-stayed bridges by over two centuries. The last area was described when further developed in a separate book by mathematician Simon de Bruges (Simon Stevin) in 1586.

Lexicography

Veranzio was the author of a five-language dictionary,[8] Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europæ linguarum, Latinæ, Italicæ, Germanicæ, Dalmatiæ, & Vngaricæ,[9] published in Venice in 1595, with 5,000 entries for each language: Latin, Italian, German, the Dalmatian language and Hungarian. These he called the "five noblest European languages" ("quinque nobilissimarum Europæ linguarum").[10]

The Dictionarium is a very early and significant example of both Croatian and Hungarian lexicography, and contains, in addition to the parallel list of vocabulary, other documentation of these two languages. In particular, Veranzio listed in the Dictionarium 304 Hungarian words that he deemed to be loanword/borrowed from Croatian. Also, at the end of the book, Veranzio included Croatian language versions of the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Ave Maria and the Apostles' Creed.[11]

In an extension of the dictionary called Vocabula dalmatica quae Ungri sibi usurparunt, there is a list of Proto-Croatian words that entered the Hungarian language. The book greatly influenced the formation of both the Croatian and Hungarian orthography; the Hungarian language accepted his suggestions, for example, the usage of ly, ny, sz, and cz. It was also the first dictionary of the Hungarian language, printed four times, in Venice, Prague (1606), Pozsony/Pozun (1834) [12], and in Zagreb,in 1971. The work was an important source of inspiration for other European dictionaries such as an Hungarian and Italian dictionary written by Bernardino Balli, a German Thesaurus polyglottus by Humanism/humanist and lexicographer Hieronim Megister, and multilingual Dictionarium septem diversarum linguarum by Peterus Lodereckerus of Prague in 1605.[10]

History and philosophy

Only a few of Veranzio's works related to history remain: Regulae cancellariae regni Hungariae and De Slavinis seu Sarmatis in Dalmatia exist in manuscript form, while Scriptores rerum hungaricum was published in 1798. In Logica nova ("New logic") and Ethica christiana ("Christian ethics"), which were published in a single Venetian edition in 1616, Veranzio dealt with the problems of theology regarding the ideological clash between the Protestant Reformation/Reformation movement and Catholicism. Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) and the Archbishop of Split Marco Antonio de Dominis (1560–1624) were his intellectual counterparts.

Legacy

The 17th century Brooklyn Tidal Mill in Long Island (NY), one of the most popular and few still standing mills in the New York City area,[13] was built after the plan of Fausto Veranzio.[13][14][15]


Notes

  1. ^ Alfred Day Rathbone, He's in the paratroops now, R.M. McBride & Company, 1943, University of California. page 172
  2. ^ Berthold Laufer, The Prehistory of Aviation Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, University of Michigan, 1928
  3. ^ "The Invention of the Parachute", by Lynn White, Jr. in: Technology and Culture, Vol. 9, No. 3. (1968), pp. 462-467 (463)
  4. ^ Jonathan Bousfield, The Rough Guide to Croatia, pg. 280, Rough Guides (2003), ISBN 1843530848
  5. ^ He's in the paratroops now, Alfred Day Rathbone, R.M. McBride & Company, 1943, University of California.
  6. ^ The book mentioning Veranzio parachute jump is John Wilkins's Mathematical Magic of the Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry, Part I: Concerning Mechanical Powers Motion, and Part II, Deadloss or Mechanical Motions (London, 1648)
  7. ^ a b Biblioteca italiana, o sia giornale di letteratura, scienze ed arti, Vol 53, New York Public Library, 1829
  8. ^ Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage by John P. Considine.
  9. ^ Apud Nicolaum Morettum, 1595, Venice
  10. ^ a b When Petrus Lodereckerus published in 1606 his Dictionarivm septem diversarvm lingvarvm, videlicet Latine, Italice, Dalmatice, Bohemicè, Polonicè, Germanicè, & Vngaricè, vna cum cuiuslibet linguæ registro siue repertorio vernaculo, Singulari studio & industria collectum a Petro Lodereckeroin (Prague), he included two more languages than Veranzio's pentadictionary: Czech language/Czech and Polish language/Polish, with the addition of indices in Latin for each language.
  11. ^ Was Faust Vrancic the first Croatian lexicographer?", by Branko Franolić, Annali Istituto Orientale di Napoli, Volume 19, 1976, p.178-182
  12. ^ Today Bratislava in Slovakia
  13. ^ a b Roger H. Charlier and Charles W. Finkl,Ocean Energy: Tide and tidal power
  14. ^ Bernard L. Gordon, Energy from the sea: marine resource readings, Book & Tackle - University of Virginia, 1977, ISBN 0910258074. - p. 119
  15. ^ ISES Congress 2007 Nothing New Under the Sun or Every Little Bit Helps Tidal Power: Status & Perspectives R.H. Charlier, M.C.P. Chaineux, C.W. Finkl, A.C Thys, Vol. I–V, Springer

References


  • No4 ref: Berthold Laufer, The Prehistory of Aviation Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, University of Michigan, 1928.
The above: Veranzio's parachute ref (does not mention Croatia ???)
  • This is odd: "Fausto was born in "Šibenik", then it's ref Today (it's) Šibenik. Strange duplication maybe it was originally Sebenico (Sibenik's old name). Creative Wiki edting here.
  • Some of Family ref is questionable (interrelation to the Wiki article)