Prospettiva Soldatesca: An Empirical Approach to the Representation of Military Architecture in the Early Modern Period

Abstract

The paper deals with the history of military perspective, that is, cavalier per-spective with a horizontal projection plane. After surveying briefly its remote origins in ancient and mediaeval transoblique or ‘Egyptian’ perspective, the au-thors explain how military perspective arose to fulfill the needs of military archi-tecture representation, in particular the depiction of the new bastion systems that were introduced in the late fifteen and sixteenth centuries as an answer to the appearance of gunpowder and artillery. Next, the paper follows its gradual expansion into broader fields as a general technical drawing procedure, while remarking a puzzling fact: until the 19th, this technique was not conceived as a projection, in contrast to orthographic drawing and linear perspective. Nev-ertheless, its awkard ‘legalisation’ in the late nineteenth century paved the way for its adoption as the most significant graphic device of the architecture of the twentieth century.