Giovanni Biagio Amico. Dell’Architettura militare

In 1750, Giovanni Biagio Amico, a Sicilian architect and theologian born in Trapani in 1684, published the second book of L’architetto Pratico in Palermo, at Angelo Felicella’s printing house. The first volume of this work, published in 1726, dealt with principles of geometry, construction practices, proportions, the design of architectural order and the ornamentation of buildings. The third part of the second volume, itself divided into four parts, concerns a short essay on Military Architecture consisting of fifteen chapters accompanied by eight plates and nine tables. Starting with Cosa sia Architettura Militare. Suoi Principi, e sua Perfezione a dì nostri and the description of the advantages and disadvantages of building fortresses on sites with different characteristics, the abbot goes on to explain how to build roads, bridges and squares in fortified cities. The essay intends to describe, through an in-depth study of the text and the reading of the attached tables, this part of the ‘treatise’ that, even today, represents an indispensable tool for understanding the degree of information and expertise that an 18th-century Sicilian architect was required to possess. Amico’s work, in fact, lends itself to reading on different levels precisely because of the vastness of the topics covered. Those interested in the technical aspects of construction or the distribution criteria in vogue in the mid-eighteenth century will find it the most complete and intriguing writing that Sicilian culture of the time produced. Through a comparison between text and image, the aim is to restore a piece of a history of architecture, which is also a history of representation, that deepens ‘Mediterranean’ thinking on the subject of fortifications.