The collection of fortification drawings and draughtsmanship in eighteenth century Hospitaller Malta

Abstract

In the Sophist, Plato observed that one can make a house both by the 'art of building' and by the 'art of painting'. In other words, buildings can exist both in the physical world and in the realm of ideas. Actually, most structures are first conceived in the imagination. Thomas Wells Schaller rightly noted in The Art of Architectural Drawing: Imagination & Technique (1997), that buildings ‘always begin as drawings’ and as ‘concepts on paper’, architectural drawings are the ‘very essence of planning, designing, and executing structures’. The same can be said to also have held true in the practice of military architecture. For despite the often urgent nature of war, major works of fortification were generally conceived first as designs on the drawing board before being imposed on the landscape and shaped into impregnable strongholds. The hand-drawn plans and elevations illustrated in this book stand witness to the great importance that drawing, and hence draughtsmanship, assumed in the preparations for war within the milieu of military organizations - in this case, the renowned Hospitaller Order of the Knights of St. John the Baptist, otherwise known as the Knights of Malta. The Order of St. John, by its very nature a religious-military institution dedicated to a perpetual state of warfare against the enemies of the Christian faith, invested huge resources in its efforts to surround its convent, its territorial possessions, its subject peoples, and its naval establishments with the most technologically-advanced ramparts and systems of fortification possible. Indeed, the story of the Order’s twoand- a-half centuries of rule over the Maltese Islands can be said to have been, in many ways, a history of fortification. The planning, designing, and building of such an extensive system of ramparts was only possible because these efforts were supported by an efficient organization.