Lilia Campana Halff

In 1744, the Venetian sea captain Gerolamo Maria Balbi (1693– 1761) presented the Senate with a project to build a galea alla ponentina (" galley of Western design ") that would join the Venetian fleet based in Corfu. The Senate approved Balbi's project hoping that the galley of new design would restore Venice's maritime reputation after the losses of the war against the Ottomans in 1718. The construction of the galley by the Venetian shipwright Giovan Battista Fausto lasted more than two years and was sent to Corfu in 1746. However, the newly built galley proved to be unseaworthy due to its faulty design and was sent back to Venice where it lay abandoned in the Arsenal until its dismissal in 1753. This article discusses Balbi's galley, which offers a unique glimpse into the technical experimentation in ship design in the Arsenal during the last decades of the Republic of Venice.

Generally, it is assumed that Italian women played a very limited economic role during the Renaissance. While it is recognized that they might act as suppliers of capital or as workers at the lowest levels of manufacturing, it is often not realized that they could also function as independent merchants and entrepreneurs. The "merchantesses" of Renaissance Venice demonstrate that this was possible and that women could achieve a relatively important role in the local economy as traders and as organizers of production in certain industries.

a number of topics such as the golden ratio and the cosmic role of polyhedral solids. In its second part, Pacioli focuses on architecture and Vitruvius's canon of proportion, which he interprets as the anthropomorphic and anthropometric matrix for the production of architectural space. In addition, Pacioli attempts to construe the male body as a model of cosmic beauty, which in turn can be described in a mathematical way. Thus, the Vitruvian homo ad circulum et quadratum becomes the divine apotheosis of basic geometrical forms. However, Pacioli also makes use of the metaphorical, narrative dimensions of the human body as practiced in architectural discourse of his time, linking his text in this way not only backward to Vitruvius, but also forward to Vesalius and the new Renaissance knowledge of empirical anatomy. danieL neWSoMe, the city University of new york, the gradUate center Beyond Harmonics: Leon Battista Alberti's Forgotten Proportions from De re aedificatoria This paper addresses the collection of Alberti's architectural proportions as described in his treatise De re aedificatoria and the problems of finding these proportions in actual buildings. The structural designs of Alberti have often been analyzed using the musically derived ratios he promotes in book 9 of De re, but these proportions are just a part of his larger theory. In the same part of the book he also describes numbers derived from the cube and numbers from the three principal mathematical means. Historians have typically ignored these other relationships favoring the Pythagorean intervals. When all of his mathematical derivations are included and the ambiguity of measurement is factored in, his system of architectural proportion includes more than it excludes. This paper describes the proportions that have been ignored and shows how most any building can demonstrate Albertian proportion. LiLia caMPana, texas a & M University Geometrical methods in Ship Design Used by Shipbuilders in the Venetian Arsenal from the Late middle Ages to the Renaissance In the late middle Ages, shipbuilding was mostly an empirical practice depending on the shipwrights' skill, which developed from acquired experience communicated orally from masters to apprentices, and fathers to sons. However, during this period practical shipbuilding knowledge began to be recorded in texts, and no longer limited to the tradition of oral transmission. Literary evidence suggests that, at least starting from the fourteenth century, shipwrights used a number of geometrical methods to ensure control over the final shape of a ship's hull with a fair degree of precision. Although it is assumed that shipwrights were generally uneducated craftsmen, the geometrical methods used in ship design involved a profound understanding of mathematical notions, such as algorithms and triangular numbers. This paper aims to explain as clearly as possible the geometrical methods used in ship design during the medieval and Renaissance periods in the Arsenal of Venice. By presenting several written sources, such as the unpublished Libro di Navigar (mid-fourteenth century), we attempt to demonstrate that shipbuilding was a complex craft dictated by geometric rules, which, during the Renaissance, found similar applications in the principles of architectural design and perspective in painting.