Martha Pollak's Cities at War can be seen as an expansion of her earlier important work on Turin (Turin 1564–1680). It is convincingly pan-European and serves as an excellent overview of European fortifications with a wonderful number of illustrations. In the first chapter, “The Geometry of Power,” Pollak lays out the new demands of fortress design in light of modern artillery and particularly the citadel, a mini-city. The models were Paciotto's fortresses in Turin and Antwerp and the “pentagonal fortress” indeed was multiplied throughout Europe. The citadel was isolated from the city center, causing the “secularization of the sovereign's residence” (12). It required a wide space around it and easy paths of access. A useful history of the development of the pentagonal fort follows — including those in Florence, Parma, and Rome — and then a review of such ideas to Louis XIV and Vauban.
The siege was the manner of warfare appropriate to the newly fortified city and is the subject of the second chapter. Reviewing the imagery associated with the sieges of Vienna (1529, 1683), Ingolstadt (1549), and Breda (1628), Pollak notes that artists came to balance an exact attention to the plan and ‘journalistic’ detail in perspective. In the third chapter, Pollak locates new ideas for urbanism in ex novo citadels like Palmanova and La Valletta. Surpassing the older attention to the ideal city, she sees the prioritization of defense in such cities as a model for urbanism adequate for modern life. Palmonova is a “radial” plan while La Valletta is “orthogonal” in design; each was widely publicized throughout Europe. After a review of other such cities (Wolfenbüttel, Guastalla, Sabbionetta, and others), Pollak shows how their clear design of gates and roads was reflected in other cities. She believes that a military motivation for the well-known urbanistic development of Rome by Sixus V, for example, “has not been considered sufficiently” (188).
In a chapter on public festivities, Pollak considers the peacetime counterpart to war preparations in the city. In discussing processions, arches, and equestrian statues, we find the deployment of bellicose knowledge for girding state identity. Preparations for processions have a lot in common with the preparation for an approaching army. Houses and lean-tos were cleared. The resurrection of the triumphal procession “imprinted the city with military narratives” (245). Cannon-founders turned their talents to creating equestrian statues, while public amusement included mock-battles and naumachiae. The final epilogue closes the circle by reviewing fireworks, the spectacle that echoes the firepower that initiated modern fortifications in the first place.
Pollak states that the innovative forms of military architecture “needed an urban site and graphic representation to become influential” (61). She relies heavily on prints and “emblems, party-books, drawing manuals, individual engraved sheets, and painted panels” (85). This would seem to privilege the self-fashioning of the city, as when she discusses “siege views” rather than sieges themselves. But if one remembers that her focus is on urbanization, it can be seen that emphasis will be placed on the ways ideas of urbanization could travel. Thus, the book might be better named Cities and War. It is a discussion of the idea of the city in light of the realities of modern warfare.
Andrea Palladio and the Architecture of Battle reproduces for the first time Palladio's companion to his book on Julius Caesar's Commentaries (Legions, the Arms and the Orders of the Romans, 1575), an aborted edition of Polybius's Histories (Dell'imprese de’ Greci, de gli Asiatici, de’ Romani et d'altri). A single, printed version was discovered by John Hale in the British Museum in 1977. Another version, in a private collection in Florence, was dedicated to Francesco de’ Medici in 1579, and emerged on the antiquarian market in 1986 and appears to be a “fair copy” (37). Palladio seems to have been very close to completing the book, but death intervened. The book includes bibliographic information, as in Stephen Parker's notes on the British Library version, adding to Hale's notes on its arrival within the collection, in addition to a brief conservation report by Sara Mazzarino, and a comparison of handwriting, texts, and the position of the plates.
Guido Beltramini, the editor of the volume, puts the manuscript into context with a long introduction, which is supported by a number of interpretive essays. The main point is to dislodge the perception of Palladio's Julius Caesar as an anomaly and place military interests firmly in Palladio's outlook of “military humanism.” In particular, Beltramini uses the metaphor that “soldiers become bricks” (17) in these works. This overcomes the strange fact that Palladio was not interested in military architecture to complement his civil works; instead, he was interested in the “architecture of battle.” Comparisons of Palladio's Villa Mocenigo with Valla's Valla indeed show a striking similarity. But what is the iconographic significance of importing this form into villa architecture?
The Polybius was indeed intended to be a companion to the Julius with the same number of plates — forty-two. Beltramini shows how Palladio's images were intended to overcome the schematic indications of troop formations of Machiavelli (in Arte della Guerra). For example, Domenico Mora's Il Soldato (1570) still has symbols. While Savorgnan's Arte militare terrestre e maritime, then in manuscript, may have been an influence, it was not published until 1599. The closest parallel that Beltramini finds is Leonhart Fronsberger's Von Kayserlichem Kriegssrechten (1566), which he proves was known in Vicenza. Palladio makes the diagrammatic even more unobtrusive than in what would appear in Savorgnan's book, and does everything to create a work that “can be viewed” (30). Beltramini makes a brief but convincing case that Palladio's images serve the kind of aesthetic fed by news sheets.
Marco Formisano locates Palladio's military humanism within a rich historical context, between timeless, ancient exempla favored by ancient historiography and a more modern attention to chance and fortuna. The faith in abstract rules, as found in Machiavelli and still in Patrizi's Paralleli Militari of 1599, is found also in Palladio's wish to drill soldiers directly from Aelian's instructions. Luciano Pezzolo's chapter is a useful review of military science and its changing trends in Palladio's time and places the real needs to improve the organization and drilling of the cernide, or territorial militia, in context. In a more anthropological vein, Claudio Povolo reflects on the peculiar nature of Vicenza as a piccola patria, and the claims of aristocracy and wealth in Venice's terra firma at the time of Palladio. Finally, Francesco Paolo Fiore contributes to the prehistory of castrametation in Sebastiano Serlio's adaptations of Polybius's description in his unpublished Munich manuscript for On Roman Fortifications according to Polybius (inv. 190).
Given its appearance in Beltramini's previous work (and its consonance with that of Manfredo Tafuri and Ennio Concina), the absence of references to military humanism in Urbino was striking. At the time of the preparation of Palladio's Julius Caesar and Polybius, Venice's army was still replete with Urbino's minor nobility and the learned Francesco Maria II was being actively considered as captain general of Venetian forces (1575–78). Furthermore, Urbino's absurdly large contributions to the Battles of Malta (1565) and Lepanto (1571) were testament to its superior militia, surely the envy of Venice.
