TY - JOUR
AU1 - Letkiewicz, Marek
AB - Summary The article presents an interpretation of two pages from a technological Renaissance manuscript by a Venetian physician and engineer. Giovanni de Fontana (1395-1455) - the treatise Bellicorum instrumentorum Liber. stored at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich (BSB Code.icon. 242). and dated to 1420-1430. Fontana’s projects with picture- texts Castellum umbrarum (The Castle of Shadows) and Apparientia noctuma (Night Appearance) are the starting point in Europe of the history of optical projections of confabulated moving pictures. Europe had already known three techniques of production of moving (motion) pictures (apart from hypnosis, hallucinations, trance, and ecstatic visions): camera obscura. minor reflection and projection of shadows as well as the natu- ral optical phenomenon of Fata Morgana in the south of European Continent, but these produced real-time optical projections of moving pictures; they showed a copy of the really existing environment. Fontana's ideas, however, opened a prospect of realizing the concept of projection of artificially produced and recorded diapositives that could be repeatedly screened at any time as kinetic pictures. In the field of production of moving pictures this was a technological and media breakthrough, which paved the way to modern cinema and the electronic media. The author discusses the scientific, aesthetic, esoteric, technological, psycho- and so- ciocultural as well as media-related themes of this issue. He also deals with the problem of reproduction of the communication codes used by Fontana, characteristic of his epoch but later abandoned, and tries to reinterpret his designs in their light. Moreover, he at- tempts to make a virtual reconstruction of Fontana's Castle of Shadows as a cubature object in the digital 3 D space, which makes the problem of the reception of Fontana’s ideas more intelligible. The author also examines the picture-texts in question from the spectator’s perspective and discusses the ontological aspect of the projections of phantoms of liglit and shadows. Fontana’s designs, like other products of magnificent fifteenth-century engineering (e.g. the structure of Brunelleschi’s dome), were a kind of testimony to the competence of the human intellect. They were associated with the titles of ingegneri or ingeniatores. which shows Fontana and his contemporary constmctors-inventors as men of intellect, geniuses, and the constructors of new. smart devices. These terms are the track leading to the forgotten trend of the magnificent art of kinetic visual objects, only fragmentarily preserved until the present, in which Fontana’s contemporaries saw the reflection of the glory of human inventiveness.
TI - Kino przed kinem – wczesnorenesansowe pocza̢tki ruchomych konfabulowanych obrazów. Uwagi o dwóch kartach z manuskryptu Giovanniego Fontany Bellicorum instrumentorum Liber / Cinema before Cinema – The Early-Renaissance Beginnings of Confabulated Moving Pictures. Remarks on Two Pages from the Manuscript of Giovanni Fontana Bellicorum instrumentorum Liber
JF - Annales UMCS, Artes
DO - 10.2478/v10075-012-0009-3
DA - 2011-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/de-gruyter/kino-przed-kinem-wczesnorenesansowe-pocza-tki-ruchomych-Gmpv3tGU4L
SP - 9
VL - 9
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -