A new book produced jointly by the International Institute for Baroque Studies at the University of Malta and Malta Libraries has brought together a collection of fortification plans of the knights of the Order of St John held by the National Library of Malta. Although frequently consulted by scholars and students over the years, until now these plans have never been brought together in one extensive compendium in a manner that they deserve as a prime source of original information.

This large-format publication, titled Lines of Defence - Fortification Drawings of the Baroque Age at the National Library of Malta, sets out to capture the wealth of graphic information embodied within the various plans and designs of the fortifications of Malta, designed and built during the Hospitaller rule.

The text was prepared by Denis De Lucca, director of the International Institute for Baroque Studies, architect Hermann Bonnici, and the author of this article. The book has an introduction by Juanito Camilleri, Rector of the University of Malta, and forewords by Oliver Mamo and Maroma Camilleri of Malta Libraries.

It is difficult to appreciate at times, when standing in front of the massive rock-hewn ramparts of Valletta, Fort Manoel and many of the other Hospitaller fortifications in the Maltese islands, that the most crucial implements in the long, laborious processes that brought these lithic leviathans into being were none other than a humble sheet of paper and a pen or pencil.

Indeed, to the military engineers who planned and built the knights’ fortifications, military architecture was often defined by one word – disegno. Pietro Cataneo, in his Quattro primi libri di architectura (Venice, 1554) claimed that disegno (design, drawing), was one of the two main prerequisites in military architecture.

Fortification drawings, therefore, were not simply drawings for drawings’ sake

Such was its importance that Dutch architect and trattatista Nicholas Goldman could still authoritatively advise, in his La Nouvelle Fortification, published in 1644, that no military engineer could afford to be ignorant of painting or of perspective drawing “as it was a great shame for a master of great merit not to have the technique or the skill to draw a plan of a work [of fortification]... when his general demand[ed] it of him”.

Ever since the Renaissance, the skilful use of drawings to convey architectural concepts and ideas had ushered in a culture of visual observation and expression, establishing a primacy of graphics over words and creating a visual language, so to speak, that became the main ‘currency’ in the architect’s and military engineer’s profession.

Two examples of Prospettive Soldatesche (a type of parallel projection) showing the coastal entrenchments (trincieramenti) of Malta. Image: National Library of Malta

Such was the importance that military men came to assign to the art of projecting fortifications on paper, that they even developed their own special form of graphic representation – the prospettiva soldatesca or prospettiva cavaliera militare, intended to solve the problem of conveying complex three-dimensional visual information by raising the point of view to enable a better representation of the whole ensemble and reveal the interior layout.

Foremost among the type of drawings which were created to give form to ideas and provide technical guidelines to the construction of fortifications were the plan and sectional elevation, known as orthographic representations – these were considered to be the most “objective because all dimensions, although scaled down, were shown in true size and relation to each other”.

The plan and elevation conveyed their visual information in terms of lines, since line drawings were considered (and still remain) particularly effective in conveying shape and form, largely because of the fact that “the human eye tends to perceive edges first”.

Fortification drawings, therefore, were not simply drawings for drawing’s sake. As “concepts on paper”, architectural drawings served as the “very essence of planning, designing, and executing” works of military architecture. Fortifications, in other words, began as drawings, conceived first as designs on the drawing board before being imposed on the landscape and shaped into impregnable strongholds.

Even today, the ability to visualise the three-dimensional qualities of fortification is still one of the special demands that the study of military architecture continues to place on its student.

Disegno, as a result, remains a basic tool in the study of fortification. Although the camera and computer nowadays also add to this power of visual analysis, it is still the old hand-drawn original drawings - the sketches, elevations and sections - that continue to provide a real insight into the three-dimensional complexities of fortress construction.

A common technique employed in many of the drawings was that of attaching various layers of paper depicting different levels of the same structure onto a base plan. Photo: Stephen Spiteri

This is even more so for those works of fortification which, sadly, have been destroyed or have come down to us heavily altered and mutilated, and have survived only in graphic form, bringing to mind Robin Evan’s statement that “architecture begins and ends in pictures”.

Watermark on a plan of Fort St Elmo. Photo: Stephen Spiteri

Seen in this light, then, one of the most important sources of information on the knights’ fortifications are the plans and drawings housed in the National Library of Malta. This is the largest and most important collection of architectural plans of Hospitaller fortifications in the Maltese islands to have come down to us from this period of the island’s history. Although constituting only a fraction of the huge output of plans and models that were produced during the course of the 18th century, these drawings still represent a substantial corpus of information on the design and development of the knights’ defences.

Moreover, they also stand as a monument to the very high standards of planning and draughtsmanship that were introduced in Malta by French military engineers in the early decades of the 1700s. Some, indeed, still bear the proud signatures of the military experts who drew them – Boule, Marandon, Tousard, etc.

Many others, however, although unsigned, are known to have been drawn by qualified Maltese draughtsmen (disegnatori) in the employ of the Order’s fortification atelier. In 1792, for example, we find Giovanni Borg, earning an annual salary of 200 scudi for such services while earlier, Balì de Tigné had made extensive use of “il Donato e Capo Mastro dell’ Opere” Giuseppe Bonnici to trace plans and ‘delineare disegni’ while in 1771, he had also sought to secure the services of Gioacchino Trigance specifically because of the latter’s skills in the art and science of military architecture.

Most of these plans reveal a sophisticated and well developed mode of draughtsmanship, with finely executed designs based on scaled dimensions (the Maltese cane or qasba and, after 1715, the French toise) and colour-coding, all according to the accepted international conventions of the Baroque age.

The International Institute for Baroque Studies has plans to publish other books on other important overseas collections of fortification plans associated with the defence of the Maltese islands in the time of the knights.

Stephen Spiteri is a lecturer at the International Institute for Baroque Studies at the University of Malta.

The book Lines of Defence was produced jointly by the International Institute for Baroque Studies and Malta Libraries. This first edition is limited to 200 copies.