Chiesa di San Francesco, Montefiore d'Aso. Atrributed to the 14th-century Maestro di Offida.

Pierre, I wonder, what is your opinion on the feasibility of cross-checking merlons with other architectural elements in the Rosettes buildings?

(22-07-2026, 03:53 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.opinion on the feasibility of cross-checking merlons with other architectural elements in the Rosettes buildings?

   

You’re thinking along those lines.
For example, images 1 and 3 show the same city gate. Difference: approx. 300 years
The question is whether the VM image shows a city gate.
Gates like this are only found in larger cities.
There are other interesting features in the drawings that can be used to identify the region.

(22-07-2026, 03:53 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Pierre, I wonder, what is your opinion on the feasibility of cross-checking merlons with other architectural elements in the Rosettes buildings?

Except the onion domes, they are contemporary in Italy, if this is what you mean.
Otherwise, this is one of the topics I hope to elaborate on and discuss with everyone as soon as I'm able to present my objectives and methodology in detail.
Until then, all I can say is that I do not believe any of the architectural elements represent a specific building or location, nor do I think they function primarily as symbolic representations, even though the Rosettes as a whole may well be symbolic. 

The third option is to trace their stylistic origin. I like to refer to this as the minimalistic* approach:
Can we connect these depictions of buildings in some way if we identify them indvidually or together in previous manuscripts? Keep in mind that so far we have zero potential matches for the Rosettes imagery, except for your and Cary's Heavenly Jerusalem theory:
1. The swallowtail castle/city is too generic to be identified with a specific illustration of a castle or city. This leaves us with two avenues for its interpretation: one of them is to treat the castle as a common motif in a certain category of abstract depictions. For instance, take a look at the following mappa mundi by Giovanni Leardo (1442, east on top):


The Terrestrial Paradise and other big castles at the (far eastern) end of the world have swallowtail merlons, the other castles do not. The question of why there are castles on medieval maps is relatively clear: in most cases, each one corresponds to a real or imaginary location. In Leardo's two subsequent maps (1448 and 1452-3), the castles are identical and have no merlons, thus requiring no further analysis. In the mappae mundi I posted last month, the swallowtail merlons are the only marker of a location, so they present no difficulties: we can chalk it up to a stylistic choice that may or may not have had any antecedents (indeed, the scholar I cited assumed that the second mapmaker copied the first based on this evidence). They can also be compared with the (much later) Leardo map of 1452-3, which has bright red dots next to the labels. On the other hand, the 1442 has both types of merlons, a situation that demands an explanation. Whether it is the size of the castles, the locations associated with them, their presence at the top of the map, or some other interpretation, it is at least an "investigable" stylistic choice.

Other examples are the models of cities and buildings held by saints, as in the paintings from Trieste or this beautiful sculpture on the Loggia del Lionello in Udine, dating to 1448: 

These generally reflect real merlons, although we need more examples before we can make a definitive judgement. In Gothic frescoes, the opposite is observed: castles with merlons of either type are usually generic, with few exceptions. In Baroque frescoes, by contrast, true models of cities and castles are more common, though not universal.
In most manuscript ilustrations, swallowtail merlons are either true to nature, and sometimes contrasting with Guelph or other types of merlons, or they are applied uniformly as a stylistic convention. In both cases, there are clear and concrete explanations for their use. If we discover manuscripts where the swallowtail merlons were added for a different reason (perhaps on the map of Rome?), the same line of thought applies.

What we are looking for is to create a small database of "explainable" merlons in various types of illustrations; the more abstract, the better. Of course, that means we need to find much better manuscripts than the ones we have. 
See also: Liber ad honorem Augusti by Pietro da Eboli, c.1197 Folio 140r. Peter of Eboli invokes Wisdom
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The second avenue is to examine the potential meanings of this castle among those we are familiar with. I previously highlighted Andrea Longhi's research on subalpine castles, particularly his theory that medieval-looking structures continued to be built in the sixteenth century because they stood for power and control in people's minds, even if they were a military and financial liability. A fortified villa would have been far less impressive to the growing number of feudal landowners. This may be one of the reasons why swallowtail merlons maintained their relevance long after their practical utility expired. Perhaps castles remained common on maps for the same reason. An "important" location always had one, even if it had become a glorified villa or an obsolete pile of bricks. We can thus imagine that swallowtail merlons were added to the Rosettes castle in order to emphasize it within the larger picture. An analogy would be a 21st-century person drawing a curved skyscraper instead of a tall rectangle.
See also: T-O map with swallowtail merlons: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Check out his zodiacs too.

2. Ed's Castle: I disagree with Ed's suggestion that the three towers and tall roofs are hallmarks of an alpine castle. I have seen no evidence that such an arrangement is more common in the Alps; to me, these look like run-of-the-mill artistic conventions. The only thing I can say about this castle is that it's far less visible than its swallowtailed cousin due to its smaller size and lack of merlons.


3. The Flat Tower: this one reminds me of a flat tower like the Torre Guinigi, but it could also represent a normal merloned tower with a flat or short roof:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I'm not really familiar with the history of flat towers. They were mostly urban towers, rarely depcited before 1450. In fact, l bookmarked this early 16th-century fresco from the Santuario di San Magno because it was such an unusual sight:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

4. The walls with no merlons: these are extremely important because they connect three of the spheres and define the inner sphere on the top right. It would be amazing if we could find a diagram where walls play similar roles.
For instance: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 016I: Matthew Paris OSB, Chronica maiora II f. ivv  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Liber ad honorem Augusti by Pietro da Eboli, c.1197 Folio 115r. Salerni uprising against the Empress Constance.: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
DOC5/471 - Map of Jerusalem. Vlaanderen, Twelfth century. British Library. The Manuscript Collection (Add. MS 32343, fol. 15b).
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
 
5. The wall with swallowtail merlons follows the same pattern. It is reminiscent of our mappae mundi, where the merlons sadly do not form actual walls. I have begun collecting maps in the hope I might find some that do.

6. Onion domes - you know more about them than I do. Maybe we should make another map with depictions of them.


Bonus: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(Yesterday, 12:09 AM)Pierre Dumont Himself Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.For instance, take a look at the following mappa mundi by Giovanni Leardo (1442, east on top):

The spelling of the month names on that map is interesting. I suppose that the "Ç" in "Çenaro" and "Março", "stands for a sound like the "th" of English "think", or the initial "z-" of European Spanish, or maybe modern Greek "θ".  According to my father, that phoneme was characteristic of people in some specific parts of Veneto.  I think it typically replaced the "ci-"  of Italian, which in other dialects of Venetian is replaced by "s-".  My father said that the borough of Ciano where he lived for a while, in the Treviso province, was pronounced "Θiàn" by the locals.

Quote:3. The Flat Tower: this one reminds me of a flat tower like the Torre Guinigi, but it could also represent a normal merloned tower with a flat or short roof:

But note that the flat square yellow roof (like the pointy yellow roof of the smaller tower) is only painted, not outlined.  The inked outline does seem to depict a flat-roofed tower, but in pure side view.  So it could even be a round tower.

All the best, --stolfi