Petit traitté de la fortification moderne [manuscript] [16--]

Chauvet, Jacques, 16th cent, Chauvet, Jacques, 16th cent. Petit traicté de l'art militaire, Wassenaer, Jacob van, 1610-1666, dedicatee, Michaelius, Pompeius, ill, Lathrop C. Harper, Inc., bookseller · 5 pictures

A manuscript treatise on modern fortification, attributed to Jacques Chauvet, a 16th-century author, with a dedicatee named Wassenaer, and illustrations by Pompeius Michaelius, dated to the 1600s and held by the Smithsonian Libraries. Its pages are hand-drawn plans and elevations of fortresses, bastions and ditches in ink and watercolour, with a dense handwritten text page; a designer could take from them the layered geometry of star-shaped bastions, moats and earthwork profiles as a structural diagram vocabulary.

Fortification · Military engineering · Siege warfare

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