Fausto Veranzio

Fausto's uncle, Antonio, engraved by Martin Rota.

Fausto was born in Sebenico (Šibenik), Venetian Dalmatia into the Croatian family of count Michele/Mihovil Vrančić (Veranzio) and Katarina Berislavić.[7] His father was a Latin poet, while his uncle was Antun Vrančić,[7][8] archbishop of Esztergom (1504–1573), a diplomat and a civil servant, who was in touch with Erasmus (1465–1536), Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), and Nikola IV Zrinski (1508–1566), who took care of Fausto's education and later travelled with him during some of Antun's travels through Hungary and in the Republic of Venice.[9] Faust had a brother Kazimir (1557-1637).[7]

While the family's main residence was in the city of Šibenik, they owned a big summer house on island of Prvić, in place of Šepurine, a neighboring place to Prvić-Luka (where he is buried in the local church). The Baroque castle that was used by the Vrančić family as summer residence is now in possession of the Draganić family. Faust later in his life, 1578, was married to Marieta Zar with hom had a daughter Alba-Roza and possibly a son who died young.[7]

As a youth, under Antun's tutelage,[7] Veranzio was interested in science. Still a child, he moved to Venice, where he attended school, and then to Padua to join the University, where he focused on law, physics, engineering and mechanics.

At the court of King Rudolf II, at the Hradčany castle in Prague, Veranzio was chancellor for Hungary and Transylvania often in contact with Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe. After his wife's death,[10] Veranzio left for Hungary. In 1598, he got the title of bishop of Csanád (Episcŏpus Csanadiensis) in partibus (even though he never set foot in Csanád). In 1609, back in Venice, he joined the brotherhood of Paul of Tarsus (barnabites) and committed himself to the study of science. Veranzio died in 1617 in Venice and was buried in Dalmatia, near his family's countryhouse on the island of Prvić.

"Machinae Novae" plate n. 38: Veranzio's parachute

One of the illustrations in Machinae Novae is a sketch of a parachute dubbed Homo Volans ("The Flying Man"). Having examined Leonardo da Vinci's rough sketches of a parachute, Veranzio designed one of his own.[14][15] Paolo Guidotti had already attempted to carry out the idea, ending by falling on a house roof and breaking his thigh bone (about 1590); but while Francis Godwin was writing his flying romance The Man in the Moone, Fausto Veranzio is widely believed to have performed an actual parachute-jumping experiment[16] and, therefore, to be the first man to build and test a parachute. According to legend, Veranzio, in 1617, at over sixty-five years of age, implemented his parachute design and tested it by jumping from St Mark's Campanile in Venice.[17] This event was documented some 30 years later in the book Mathematical Magick or, the Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry (London, 1648), written by John Wilkins, the secretary of the Royal Society in London.

But in his book, where Wilkins wrote about flying and the possibility of human flight,[18] methods of slowing down people's fall through the air were not his concern. His treatise does not even mention Veranzio by name, nor does it document any jump by parachute or any event at all in 1617.[18] No evidence has ever been found of any test of Veranzio's parachute.

A wind turbine design

His areas of interest in engineering and mechanics were broad. Mills were one of his main point of research, where he created 18 different designs. He envisioned windmills with both vertical and horizontal axes, with different wing constructions to improve their efficiency. The idea of a mill powered by tides incorporated accumulation pools filled with water by the high tide and emptied when the tide ebbed, simply using gravity; the concept has just recently been engineered and used. The first wind turbines were described by Fausto Veranzio. In his book Machinae Novae (1616) he described vertical axis wind turbines with curved or V-shaped blades.

By order of the Pope, he spent two years in Rome where he envisioned and made projects needed for regulating rivers, since Rome was often flooded by the Tiber river.[19] He also tackled the problem of the wells and water supply of Venice, which is surrounded by sea.[19] Devices to register the time using water, fire, or other methods were envisioned and materialized. His own sun clock was effective in reading the time, date, and month, but functioned only in the middle of the day.

The construction method of building metal bridges and the mechanics of the forces in the area of statics were also part of his research. He drew proposals which predated the actual construction of modern suspension bridges and cable-stayed bridges by over two centuries. The last area was described when further developed in a separate book by mathematician Simon de Bruges (Simon Stevin) in 1586. Veranzio also designed the concept to modern tied-arch bridges, through arch bridges, truss bridges and aerial lifts.

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  Drawing of suspension cable-stayed bridge by Fausto Veranzio in his Machinae Novae
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  Drawing of a suspension bridge by Fausto Veranzio (Machinae Novae)
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  Early design of a tied-arch/through arch bridge by Fausto Veranzio
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  Truss arch bridge by Fausto Veranzio
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  Primitive design of an early truss bridge by Fausto Veranzio
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  Design for an aerial lift by Fausto Veranzio (Machinae Novae)

Frontespiece of the Dictionarium quinque lingarum

Veranzio was the author of a five-language dictionary,[20] Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europæ linguarum, Latinæ, Italicæ, Germanicæ, Dalmatiæ, & Vngaricæ,[21] published in Venice in 1595, with 5,000 entries for each language: Latin, Italian, German, the Dalmatian vernacular (in particular, the chakavian dialect of Croatian) and Hungarian. These he called the "five noblest European languages" ("quinque nobilissimarum Europæ linguarum").[22]

The Dictionarium is a very early and significant example of both Croatian and Hungarian lexicography, and contains, in addition to the parallel list of vocabulary, other documentation of these two languages. In particular, Veranzio listed in the Dictionarium 304 Hungarian words that he deemed to be borrowed from Croatian. Also, at the end of the book, Veranzio included Croatian language versions of the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Ave Maria and the Apostles' Creed.[23]

In an extension of the dictionary called Vocabula dalmatica quae Ungri sibi usurparunt, there is a list of Proto-Croatian words that entered the Hungarian language. The book greatly influenced the formation of both the Croatian and Hungarian orthography; the Hungarian language accepted his suggestions, for example, the usage of ly, ny, sz, and cz. It was also the first dictionary of the Hungarian language, printed four times, in Venice, Prague (1606), Pozsony (1834),[24] and in Zagreb (1971). The work was an important source of inspiration for other European dictionaries such as a Hungarian and Italian dictionary written by Bernardino Baldi, a German Thesaurus polyglottus by humanist and lexicographer Hieronymus Megiser, and multilingual Dictionarium septem diversarum linguarum by Peterus Lodereckerus of Prague in 1605.[22]

Only a few of Veranzio's works related to history remain: Regulae cancellariae regni Hungariae and De Slavinis seu Sarmatis in Dalmatia exist in manuscript form, while Scriptores rerum hungaricum was published in 1798. In Logica nova ("New logic") and Ethica christiana ("Christian ethics"), which were published in a single Venetian edition in 1616, Veranzio dealt with the problems of theology regarding the ideological clash between the Reformation movement and Catholicism. Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) and the Archbishop of Split Marco Antonio de Dominis (1560–1624) were his intellectual counterparts.