Francesco di Giorgio Martini¿s fortress complexes, created at the
end of the Quattrocento, continue to look experimental and highly
speculative half a millenium later by their semiotic character. They
represent an extreme of European architectural history, occupying
a position where architecture and sculpture cannot be sharply distinguished
any longer. The alien-looking creations represented in
this book have their origins in a particular historic situation: the
emergence of firearms in the 14th century and their spread in the
15th century had shifted the balance of warfare in favour of the
attacking side, against which the defensive structure had not yet
found a remedy.
Enter Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439¿1502) at this point,
a native of Siena and one of the Quattrocento¿s highly versatile
artists. He worked mainly in Federico da Montefeltro¿s Urbino,
and left behind a body of work that included painting ¿ the three
famous prospects of ideal cities in Berlin, Baltimore and Urbino
are attributed to him ¿, sculpture ¿ primarily his imposing reliefs ¿,
and architecture ¿ here he was definitely the outstanding figure
between Alberti and Bramante. His achievements as an engineer
are equally impressive, and his elaborate designs for machines
strongly influenced those of Leonardo da Vinci. He was a true Renaissance
uomo universale, though, despite of his voluminous
and influential theoretical work, less in the sense of a humanist
homme de lettres than as an all-round artist.
Francesco¿s sacred and secular structures are classicist and
austere in nature, yet his fortress structures look as if, moving beyond
all functional concerns, he is exploiting the newness of the
task, the lack of any tried and tested technical solutions and the
removal of all typological boundaries to give his architectonic fantasies
free rein, resulting in an apotheosis of the new, the unfamiliar
and the alien.
This book is an attempt to understand the strangely grandiose
semiotic character of these structures. In doing so, it poses the
question of what strategies can be used when seeking a shape
for buildings for which there is no precedent.
