We have looked at Kyeser, Taccola, and other late medieval engineers as an inspiration for the VM, noticing they all contain highly similar illustrations. I would like to find the source for these illustrations. But while Kyeser as a person clearly pre-dates Taccola, this is hampered by the fact that manuscripts of those authors were copied over a considerable time-frame, likely copying from each other.
The main source of medieval siege and military literature was You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view., a Late Roman writer from the 4th century. His work
De re militari, or
Epitoma rei militaris remained a popular military literature until the 19th century. However, for different reasons that one might think. Jorge asked why many illustrations in the works of all authors who copied him make no sense and look like the artist had no idea about the machine depicted. The reason is the same as for fantastic and widely inaccurate plants in herbals. Vegetius himself was, as far as we know, nether a historian, soldier nor an engineer - but an aristocrat. Modern scholars are critical of his descriptions of the Roman army and note that he carelessly compiled material from different sources and time periods and is full of inconsistencies and obvious mistakes. Vegetius lived at a time of decline of the Roman Empire and reminisced a better (and obviously fictious) 'Golden Age', much like Plato's description of Sparta as an ideal state. In other words, even the original work was - basically a fake.
Quote:Although the text was historically taken at face value during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as an accurate contemporary work on the Roman army and as a valuable military manual, modern historians have questioned the accuracy of the claims that Vegetius made about the state of the Roman army in his time. According to Michael B. Charles "many details that he provides about the [Roman] military are simply wrong", and said that it was "doubtful" that he had any military experience, arguing that the work was "not meant to be an accurate exposition of Roman military history, or indeed [then] present-day military activities", and that only "small but nonetheless valuable nuggets" of information in the text are actually valuable for understanding the Late Roman Army. The work has also been criticised on stylistic grounds. Sydney Anglo stated that the work was "mediocre" and that "its coverage of Roman military institutions is derivative, patchy, inconsistent and repetitious", and that Vegetius blended information from vastly different time periods in an unclear and confused way, with Anglo stating that "Vegetius's account of Roman military usage was not so much anachronistic as extra-chronistic. It was outside any specific time."
Now why would such a faux military guide be popular for 1500 years? First, it did contain some valid organizational and strategical advice, second, it was not intended to be used by military officers. Vegetius was an aristocrat, and his audience was nobility. We must see such works in a more abstract way. The historian Werner Leng wrote about the reception of Vegetius works from the middle ages to modernity that Vegetius was rarely seen as a military field guide for officers, but more of a cultural and aesthetic guide for nobility who sought to present themselves as the successors of the Roman Empire. Also as a political and moralistic guide on leadership and organization in line with the teachings of Aristoteles or Plato.
This is something we often tend to forget when we look at medieval manuscripts from a modern perspective. A herbal like Dioscorides was not created to be used by a physician to treat patients. A manuscript on warfare and engineering like Kyeser was not created to be used by a military officer or engineer. They were conversation pieces and collectibles for nobility that were meant to show the owner was familiar with the teachings of the re-discovered authorities of antiquity. Even the obviously practical notebooks of engineers like Taccola and Ghiberti were also representational. The machines are mostly useless. They are fantastic ideas, like one would draw a martian colony nowadays. Inspirational, aesthetic, fashionable. This is why we have all those copies of impossible machines. They were fancy. The question is who came up with the illustrations first? Like Dioscorides, the oldest copies of Vegetius appear to have been un-illustrated. At some point, an artist tried to create more-or less accurate illustrations of war and siege machines from the text, which were then copied further. But these were never technical drawings in a modern sense. Ideas at best, like Taccola's sketches. I'd say the Ghiberti cipher falls in the same category. It was a hot topic at the time. Something you'd incorporate into your works because it was the thing to do. Protecting ideas from casual readers surely also played a role, but not the main one.
In a harsh way you could say all those high-end manuscripts were fakes, pretending to be something they were not. Which was fine since the buyer did not use them for their alleged purpose anyway.
I'd still like to find early illustrated copies of Vegetius work and compare them to Kyeser's war machines. Early Kyeser illustrations are mostly flat and straight full medieval, while Taccola's drawings are much more organic and humanistic, more in line with VM drawings. Yet some elements like the wavy shore line are already present in Kyeser. So the question is - were Vegetius copies illustrated before Kyeser's 'Bellifortis' or did Kyeser invent those illustration and they found their way itto later Vegetius copies - and Taccola? The origin of the illustrations appears to be complex and cross-linked but paradoxically it appears all the war machine illustrations originate from Kyeser (who copied Vegetius' text), not from an illustrated Vegetius copy. Later ones like those of Valturius from 1470s (Rosenwald 5+6), likely copied from Taccola. And Ghiberti from either of those. But I'm not sure yet.