Fausto Veranzio

Faust Vrančić or Fausto Veranzio ([Faustus Verantius or Verancsics Faustus] Error: {{Lang-xx}}: text has italic markup (help); (Šibenik circa 1551 – Venice, January 17, 1617) was a bishop, humanist, philosopher, historian, diplomat, linguist, lexicographer, and inventor from the town of Šibenik in the Venetian Republic (today modern Croatia).

Life

Family history

Vrančić's uncle, Antun Vrančić, engraved by Martin Rota

The Vrančić (Veranzio) family came to Šibenik (Dalmatia), where a member of the family was mentioned for the first time in 1360. His father, Michele, was a Latin poet and on his mother's side he was from the Berislavić family (s. Trogir). While the family's main residence was in Šibenik, they owned a summer house in Šepurine, a village neighbouring Prvić Luka, where he is buried. The family owned substantial amounts of land on the island of Prvić and acquired an impressive art collection. Descendants of the family still live in the summer house in Šepurine. His uncle, Antun Vrančić (also Antonio Veranzio; in Hungarian: Verancsics Antal (1504–1573), diplomat and high civil servant, was in touch with Dutch philosopher, humanist and writer Erasmus (1465–1536); with German philosopher, theologian and reformer Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560); and with Nikola Zrinski (1508–1566), ban, poet, statesman and soldier.

Activities

As a youth, Vrančić was interested in science. He attended schools in Padua (Padova) and Venice, where he focused on physics, engineering and mechanics. At the court of King Rudolf II in Hradcany in Prague Vrančić was Chancellor for Hungary and Transylvania often in contact with Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe. In 1598 he got the title of bishop of Csanad.

After his wife's death, Vrančić left for Hungary and later for Venice to join the brotherhood of Saint Paul (barnabites) in 1609, where he committed himself to the study of science.

Vrančić died in 1617 in Venice. By his own request, he was buried in Prvić Luka, a village on the island of Prvić island near Šibenik.

Work

Lexicography

Vrančić was the author of a five-language dictionary, Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europeae linguarum; Latinae, Italicae, Germanicae, Dalmaticae et Hungaricae, published in Venice in 1595, with 5,000 entries for each language: Latin, Italian, German, the Dalmatian language (in particular, the Chakavian dialect of Croatian) and Hungarian. These he called the "five noblest European languages" ("quinque nobilissimarum Europeae linguarum"). When Peterus Lodereckerus published the second edition of Vrančić's dictionary in Prague, he referred to the Dalmatian language as Croatian. Since that publication the language has continued to be known as Croatian.

In an extension of the dictionary called Vocabula dalmatica quae Ungri sibi usurparunt, there is a list of Croatian words that entered the Hungarian language. The book greatly influenced the formation of both the Croatian and Hungarian languages orthography; the Hungarian language accepted his suggestions, for example, the usage of ly, ny, sz, and cz. It was also the first dictionary of the Hungarian language, printed four times, in Venice, Prague (1606), Pozun (1834) (what is nowadays Bratislava in Slovakia), and in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1971. The work was an important source of inspiration for other European dictionaries; among them:

• Hungarian and Italian written by Bernardino Balli
• German Thesaurus polyglottus by humanist and lexicographer Hieronim Megister
• Multilingual Dictionarium septem diversarum linguarum by Peterus Lodereckerus of Prague in 1605 in Latin, Italian, Bohemian, Polish, German, Hungarian, Dalmatian. The author edited the second edition of Vrančić's work and renamed the Dalmatian language for the first time into "Croatian".

Vrančić's parachute in Šibenik's Wells Museum

Technical research

Vrančić's book on mechanics, Machinae Novae (Venice 1595), contained 40 large pictures depicting 56 different machines, devices, and technical concepts. The sensational book was soon translated into Italian, Spanish, French and German. Vrančić had examined Leonardo da Vinci's rough sketches of a parachute, and set out to implement a parachute of his own. A now-famous sketch of a parachute that he dubbed Homo Volans (the Flying Man) appeared in the aforementioned book. Twenty years later, he implemented his design and tested the parachute by jumping from a tower in Venice in 1617. The event was documented some 30 years after it happened in a book written by John Wilkins, the secretary of the Royal Society in London.

His areas of interest in engineering and mechanics were broad. Mills were his main point of research, where he created 18 different designs. He envisioned windmills with both vertical and horizontal axes, with different wing construction to improve their efficiency. The idea of a mill powered by tides incorporated accumulation pools filled with water by the high tide and emptied when the tide ebbed, simply using gravity; the concept has just recently been engineered and used. By order of the Pope, he envisioned and made projects needed for regulating rivers, since Rome was often flooded by the Tiber river. He also tackled the problem of the wells and water supply of Venice, which is surrounded by sea. Devices to register the time using water, fire, or other methods were envisioned and materialized. His own sun clock was effective in reading the time, date, and month, but functioned only in the middle of the day. The construction method of building metal bridges and the mechanics of the forces in the area of statics were also part of his research. He drew proposals which predated the actual construction of modern suspension bridges and cable-stayed bridges by over two centuries. The last area was described when further developed in a separate book by mathematician Simon de Bruges (Simon Stevin) in 1586.

History and philosophy

Only a few of Vrančić's works related to history remain: Regulae cancellariae regni Hungariae and De Slavinis seu Sarmatis in Dalmatia in manuscript form, while Scriptores rerum hungaricum was published in 1798. In Logica nova and Ethica christiana, in a single Venetian edition in 1616, he dealt with the problems of theology regarding the ideological clash between the Reformation movement and Catholicism. Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) and the Archbishop of Split Marco Antonio de Dominis (1560–1624) were his intellectual counterparts.

Lost works

Vrančić published some of his works under the name "Veranzo". Many of them were never printed, left in the form of manuscripts. Some were sold to stay in big archives in the capitals of Austria or Hungary, while some were lost forever.

Legacy

Today, one of oldest astronomical societies in Croatia bears the name of Faust Vrančić, as does a Croatian Navy warship, used for rescues.

References

• The book mentioning Vrančić's parachute jump is John Wilkins's Mathematical Magic of the Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry, Part I: Concerning Mechanical Powers Motion, and Part II, Deadloss or Mechanical Motions (London, 1648).

External links

• Fausto Veranzio - Innovatore Template:It icon