Giovanni Fontana (engineer)

Fontana studied trigonometric measurements, mentioned in De trigono balistario, and through his own designed instrument, also explained in a larger treatise, however, apparently lost.

He drew not only male and female devils inspiring terror in real time by their fearsome appendages, but also the underlying mechanisms, which he laid out with the abstracting brilliance of a fifteenth-century Giacometti or Max Ernst.

When witnesses at Padua exclaimed that a torpedo he had designed must run by diabolic power, he refuted them with contempt: the device was purely mechanical, as befitted a maker who was also a master of both medieval Archimedean statics and optics and of Renaissance engineering craft.

The code contains a part dedicated to hydraulic projects, public fountains, systems of water distribution, experiments with siphons, and also alembics and alchemical vessels for two or more liquids.

According to [10,6], this manuscript shows that Fontana aimed to investigate a series of devices from ancient books of mathematicians and naturalists such as Archimedes, Heron, Philo, and even Ovid and Pliny the Elder, and the Arab writers, mainly from Al-Kindi, to his contemporary artists and craftsmen.