Between the mediterranean coast and the southern Patagonia

The graphic visions of military engineers at the service of the spanish Crown (16th & 17th centuries)

Abstract

The Mediterranean was, from an early age, a place of “production of images” by travelers, painters, architects, and especially military engineers, who, commissioned by the Spanish Crown, generated a vast amount of cartographic pieces and images with technical, architectural, and landscape information in various scales. These now constitute an essential and quite extensive data base, especially regarding the island of Sicily, one of the bastions of that sea. It’s worth mentioning significant handwritten works like those from the late 16th century by Tiburzio Spannocchi and Camillo Camilliani. Some of these technicians delineated projects that crossed the Atlantic Ocean and, in some cases, themselves had been sent to distant lands, like Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa or some components of the Juan Bautista Antonelli family.
This precious amount of data, confronted with archival documents, technical reports, and descriptions of places (and often with the biographies of the protagonists) are an indispensable tool for the study of cities and buildings that allow for the generation of new interpretations of spaces, and also solve issues related to the organization of construction sites and the history of building techniques.