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7.5Berardo Galiani, L’architettura di Marco Vitruvio Pollione (Siena, 1790), plate XXIV.

7.6Reconstruction of Vitruvius’s hoist with trestle and winch. Philippe Fleury, La mécanique de Vitruve (Caen, 1993), figure 13.

7.7Heron, Mechanics, winch and hoist. Universiteitsbibliotheek, Leiden. Cod. or. 51, page 61.

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7.8Reconstruction of Vitruvius’s hydraulic organ. Vitruvius, De architectura, ed. Pierre Gros (Turin, 1997), page 1388.

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display of indifference affected by Cicero when listing the artworks stolen by Verres in Sicily,18 Vitruvius mentions astonishing “singing blackbirds” and

“small figurines that drink and even move.” This is a moment of pure rhetoric, allowing Vitruvius to distance himself from similar trivial applications of mechanical skill and bring the discussion rapidly back to focus on the prin-ciples and ethics of Cato’s concept of utilitas;19 for those who are curious about these elegantes mechanical toys—notes Vitruvius—there are always Ctesibius’s booklets. Yet clearly, for Vitruvius the architectus is also a scriptor. The ability to write is the most significant intellectual distinguishing mark between the technítes and the man who coordinates their work; he is a rhetor who directs with his words the actions of those who actually carry out the work.

7.9Philo of Byzantium, vessel with hydraulic mechanism, reconstruction. Bernard Carra de Vaux, Le livre des appareils pneumatiques et des machines hydrauliques par Philon de Byzance (Paris, 1902), page 157.

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7.12Anonymous, four-wheeled ballista. De rebus bellicis, 1436. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Cod. oxo. can. class. lat. misc. 378, 7, 1–2.

7.10Anonymous, lightning-strike ballista. De rebus bellicis, 1436. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Cod. oxo. can. class. lat. misc. 378, 18, 16–20.

7.11Ballistae. Iusti Lipsi Poliorceticon sive De machinis, tormentis, telis, libri quinque (Antwerp, 1596), page 148.

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7.13Reconstruction of Vitruvius’s ballista. Vitruvius, De l’architecture, ed. Louis Callebat and Philippe Fleury (Paris, 1986), page 222.

7.14Design for a winch from the Arabic original, and perspectival reconstruction. Heron of Alexandria, Les mécaniques, Arabic text by Qusta ibn Luqa, trans. Bernard Carra de Vaux (Paris, 1988), pages 241 and 116.

7.15Heron, baroulkós, from Dioptra. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Mynas Codex, folio 82r. Below, reconstruction by Ludwig Nix.

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7.16Heron, baroulkós, from Mechanics. Universiteitsbibliotheek, Leiden. Cod. or. 51. Below, reconstruction by Ludwig Nix.

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7.17, 7.18Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, pump and machine for lifting water, 1354. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS. Graves. From The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, ed. Donald R. Hill (Dordrecht and Boston, 1974), pages 189 and 183.

7.19Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, water-driven clock, 1354. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS. Graves 27. The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, ed. Donald R. Hill (Dordrecht and Boston, 1974), page 31.

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Few of the machines used in medieval building sites are known and little is understood about how they were built. However, it is possible to get an idea of how they were represented by analyzing the corpus of Gothic drawings and some small notebooks such as that of the master builder Mathes Roriczer, which was printed in Regensberg on 28 June 1486. Beginning with the sol-emn premise that “all art is matter, form, and measure” the caputmagister demonstrates how to duplicate a square and how to calculate the elevation from the ground plan.45 In fact, Plato had already dealt with this problem in his Meno, and it was taken up again by Vitruvius in De architectura and again in Cesariano’s beautiful edition of Vitruvius. The procedure for the duplication of squares seems to have become customary by the time Villard de Honnecourt46 produced his model book in the first half of the thirteenth century, the golden age of the Gothic.

7.20Mathes Roriczer, Von der Fialen Gerechtigkeit (Regensburg, 1486).

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7.21Cesare Cesariano, De architectura (Como, 1521), IX, 144.

7.22Villard de Honnecourt, subdivision of a rectangle, thirteenth century, from Album. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. French manuscript 19093, folio 20v.