Fortification Design and Geometry in the Papers of Gaspare Beretta

Looking at the past, among the main modalities of transmission of knowledge (alongside with manuscripts and printed treatises and with respect to the various ‘precepts’) we would have found also various professional figures. This is even truer with regard to the training and dissemination of knowledge among military engineers, who used to be real ‘living vehicles’ in national and international cultural systems. This is also true for what concern that circumscribed set of knowledge of geometrical-mathematical theories, including their application to the codes of architectural Representation and Design. This research aims to investigate the example of the military engineer Gaspare Beretta (Milan 1620–1703), whose theoretical production both on architectural graphic and on various applications of Geometry is still unpublished. With the aim of developing the relationship between geometry, architecture and the transmission of knowledge, we will go through his practices of the regular fortress tracing on ‘paper and ground’, in order to verify the resulting connections between geometric reconstruction and Author’s intentions.