Auctor intellectualis, multimedia artist, script writer, film director, author of works in the field of history, theory and workshop issues of digital media culture and art.
Cinema before Cinema - The Early-Renaissance Beginnings of Projection Movin gPictures. Remarkson Two Pages from the Manuscript of Giovanni Fontana Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber..., ANNALES UNIVERSITATIS MARIAE CURIE-SKŁODOWSKA LUBLIN – POLONIA VOL. IX.2, 1 SECTIO L, 2011,
ABSTRACT
The article presents an interpretation of two pages from a technological Renaissance manuscript by aVenetian physician and engineer, Giovanni de Fontana (1395-1455)-the treatise Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber..., stored at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothekin Munich (BSB Code. icon. 242), and dated to 1420-1430. Fontana’s projects with picture-texts Castellum umbrarum [The Castle of Shadows] and Apparientia nocturna [Night Appearance] are the starting point in Europe of the history of optical projections of moving pictures. Europe had already known three techniques of production of moving (motion) pictures (apart from hypnosis, hallucinations, trance, andecstatic
visions): camera obscura, mirror reflectionand projection of shadows as well as the naturaloptical phenomenon of Fata Morgana in thes out hof European Continent, but these produced real-time optical projections of moving pictures; they showed a copy of the really existing environment .Fontana’s ideas, however, opened a prospect of realizing the concept of projection of artificially produced and recorded diapositives that could be repeatedly screened at any time as kinetic pictures. In the field of production of moving
pictures this was a technological and media breakthrough, which paved the way to modern cinema and the electronic media.
The author discusses the scientific, aesthetic, esoteric, technological, psycho and socioculturalas well as media-related the mes of this issue. He also deals with the problem of reproduction of the communication codes used by Fontana, characteristic of his epoch
but later abandoned, and tries to reinterpret his designs in their light. Moreover, he at tempts to make a virtual reconstruction of Fontana’sCastle of Shadows as a cubature objectint he digital 3D space, which makes the problem of the reception of Fontana’s
ideas more intelligible. The author also examines the picture-texts in question from the spectator’s perspective and discusses the ontological aspect of the projections of phantoms of light and shadows.
Fontana’s designs, like other products of magnificent fifteenth-century engineering (e.g. the structure of Brunelleschi’s dome), were a kind of testimony to the competence of the human intellect. They were associated with the titles of ingegneri or ingeniatores,
which shows Fontana and his contemporary constructors-inventors as men of intellect, geniuses, and the constructors of new, smart devices. These terms are the track leading to the forgotten trend of the magnificent art of kinetic visual objects, only fragmentarily
preserved until the present, in which Fontana’s contemporaries saw the reflection of the glory of human inventiveness.