[Book review] Tomaso Maria Napoli : a Dominican Prior’s contribution to military architecture in the Baroque age

Abstract

De Lucca's latest study on Tomaso Maria Napoli now shows that the Jesuits were not alone in the pursuit of the study and teaching of military architecture. The Dominican Order of Preachers, founded by the Spanish priest Dominic de Guzman in France in 1216, was another. By the seventeenth century, the Dominican friars excelled at the teaching of mathematics and geometry, the very basis of the art and science of fortification. Some of its members were actively consulted to review and design new works of fortification. Few know, for example, that Vincenzo Maculano da Firenzuola, the architect of the Sta. Margherita enceinte built by the Hospitaller Knights to protect their Grand Harbour in Malta in 1638, was a Dominican friar. Moreover, he was the same Firenzuola - II Cardinal Maculano - who examined Galileo Galilei during his trial in 1633, the episode dramatically represented in a painting by Cristiano Banti (1824-1904), reproduced in De Lucca's book.