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The Borgias: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty.Michael Mallet

della Quercia who, as custodian of the Siena cathedral, commissioned Taccola to carve forty-two heads in wood for the choir. He died before 1458. The manuscript here reproduced was dedicated to the emperor Sigismondo, crowned in Milan in 1431 and at that time residing in Siena. Its forty-eight leaves constitute the surviving third section (Liber Tertius) of a work that Taccola, in 1483, showed to Mariano Sozzini, humanist and professor at the university in Siena, with which Taccola was also connected for some ten years. The verso pages show real or imaginary beasts—birds, griffins, apes, basilisks, serpents, dragons—all unrelated to the text or picture. They may have been intended as designs for choir carvings. The drawing skill is not representative of the best in early Quattrocento drawings. The book was intended to impress the emperor Sigismondo with the practical arts of civil and military engineering of the time because Siena was then at war with Florence and it was hoped to gain the emperor's support by an appeal for such things as catapult gunnery, ship salvage, and water prime movers. It seems that the attempt was not successful. Dr. Beck declines attempting to evaluate the priority of Taccola's designs as inventions or to gauge their influence on the growing order of technological interest that flourished in the mid and late Quattrocento. However, recognizing Beck's special assets in language, background, and knowledge of that rich period, it would be a boon to scholarship to have this text and comments expanded into just such a critical commentary and issued in English to accommodate larger numbers of readers. The spread of Taccola's designs into the notebooks and printed texts of later ingenieri is worthy of further study, especially the influence on Francesco di Giorgio, Leonardo, Ramelli, and others.