An Italian Renaissance military camp

from Paolo Santini's De Machinis

From Paolo Santini's 15th-century engineering book, De Machinis, ff. 13v-14r.

I saw this picture in the travelling exhibition "Mechanical Marvels: Invention in the Age of Leonardo", organized by the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence, Italy. I contacted the Instituto's Franca Principe, who was so kind not only to give me permission to post this picture on the Web, but to scan it at my request in the first place. Many thanks to her and the Instituto!

Note the mix of round tents (with domelike rooves, spherical finials, dagged valences, and numerous guy-lines), triangular tents (at least one, the nearest blue one on the left, appears to have external guy-lines), and a single "cabin" tent, which appears to have side-poles held in place by external guys. All three styles of tents have notch-shaped doorways, with doors hung from the top in the manner of a curtain (and apparently billowing inward in the breeze that also waves the flags atop many of the round tents). All the tents are basically solidly colored (variously red, blue, green, and orange), with lighter colored fringes or dags on many. Two triangular tents have heraldic devices (argent, a chief sable endented, within an orle Or -- that's all the detail I can make out) painted on the sides; I'm not sure what this implies, if anything, about status connected with different styles of tents.

A large ceramic jug, a wooden barrel, and several wooden wash-tubs (or something like that) are in the lower right. Three huntsmen, one blowing a horn, and three hunting dogs are in the upper left.