VMs: Re: V-shaped battlements

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Petr,

> Such a group assault on one small detail - we might even get somewhere.

:-)

> Below are my newest results. BTW - I'm very glad that you give checkable
> references, but I would prefer if you gave the dates also. And of course
> iconographic evidence (from old illustrations) is stronger than photographs
> of (potentially restored) castles.

The castle in Imola has the most cast-iron evidence imaginable: Leonardo's 
cartographic map of Imola in 1502 as commissioned by Cesare Borgia, now at 
Windsor Castle (the map, not the Borgia, that is).

I've already posted extensively on this earlier this year, so for now 
here's a single link (the castle is at the top right):-

        http://www.stanford.edu/~mgorman/leonardo/images/imola2.jpg

Architecturally, I'm pretty sure that the key detail to pursue would be the 
external rivellins - these were only briefly fashionable during the late 
15th Century... they proved to be practically useless.

> By now I'm firmly in favour of the "fantasy castle" hypothesis. Because:
> - almost all swallow tail castles (with two exceptions) have square towers,
> not round ones,

Can you directly infer from the scans we have that the VMS castle has 
definitively a square or a round tower? I'm not ~quite~ so sure. :-/

> - none (none!) of the castles with swallow tail towers also has "lightning
> conductor" style towers.

Agreed that this is a problem - though pictorial evidence of these is very 
thin on the ground.

I've asked the museum at Imola (which is based in the castle) to see if 
there are any signs of post-holes that might indicate where a wooden 
superstructure on the tower may have been placed. It may be that no-one had 
thought to look for these before! :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....