Glacial Errata, No. 60

One

We had come to Bologna, primarily, to see the anatomical wax displays at the Palazzo Poggi, which, based on photographs I’d seen, are among the most spectacular in Europe. Unfortunately, when we arrived, we discovered that the majority of the museum was undergoing renovation, including the anatomical wing. It was due to re-open in a matter of days, but we were going to miss it. Instead, we toured what was open, which included primarily the military history wing.

I didn’t have my hopes up, but what we found was actually quite stunning.

Two

The Palazzo Poggi has an entire room of these woodcuts, illustrating the evolution of the European fortresses from the mid-16th century through to the early 18th century.

Bastion forts, as they were known, were an evolution of traditional fortress design in the age of the cannon: because it was impractical (read: impossible) to train a cannon downward over a parapet (as archers would have done with arrows in an earlier age), you needed a way to fire them at invading armies. The star-shaped lines of the bastion fort eliminated blindspots and allowed for cannons to be placed parallel to the “spokes,” so to speak, and fired at a shallower angle downward along the length of the fort.

The star-shaped walls were also better at deflecting cannon fire from invaders than a traditional, linear wall, which presented an easier target that would have absorbed the hit dead on. The increasing complexity in these designs reflects an attempt to create fortifications that could better absorb and deflect cannon fire, as gunpowder-based weapons became more sophisticated.

Three

This collection of woodcuts was the product of Luigi Ferdinando Marsili (1658-1730). Marsili, a polymath who, Wikipedia tells me, was also the founder of oceanography, became fascinated with the evolution of fortresses and commissioned these woodcut reliefs to demonstrate the various innovations and designs by various Italian, Dutch, French, and German architects.

You’re getting a small sample here; the entire room was full of these. (There’s an image of the gallery here if you want to get a better sense of how many there are.) Also difficult to fully appreciate here is the lusciousness of the woodgrain texture in these; they’re really something to behold in person.

Four

The remnants of these bastion forts litter Europe and North America, and they have become, in the last few years, subject of a strange conspiracy theory. Ancient Alien fans have lately begun to allege that they were not built as military installations at all. Rather, these kooks argue, they are the remnants of the power sources of a giant, ancient race (Battery Park in lower Manhattan, certain idiots will tell you, is so named because the forts located there and on Governors Island were actually a means to store cosmic energy). I wrote about this nonsense awhile back for Atlas Obscura, so you can read that here if you’d like to go down that rabbit hole. (There’s overlap between the Star Forts theory and the larger conspiracy theory involving Tartaria, which I wrote about in much greater depth here, if you’d like to fall down an even deeper rabbit hole.)

Five

These fortifications appear in W. G. Sebald’s last novel Austerlitz, where Jacques Austerlitz explains to Sebald’s narrator that, while such fortifications may strike one as being the “emblem of both absolute power” and bearing “the ingenuity of the engineers put to the service of that power,” in fact this is far from true. For, in the actual practice of warfare, “the star-shaped fortresses which were being built and improved everywhere during the eighteenth century did not answer their purpose, for intent as everyone was on that pattern, it had been forgotten that the largest fortifications will naturally attract the largest enemy forces, and that the more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive, so that in the end you might find yourself in a place fortified in every possible way, watching helplessly while the enemy troops, moving on to their own choice of terrain elsewhere, simply ignored their adversaries’ fortresses, which had become positive arsenals of weaponry, bristling with cannon and overcrowded with men.”

The frequent result, Austerlitz continues, “of resorting to measures of fortifications marked in general by a tendency towards paranoid elaboration was that you drew attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it, not to mention the fact that as architectural plans for fortifications became increasingly complex, the time it took to build them increased as well, and with it the probability that as soon as they were finished, if not before, they would have been overtaken by further developments, both in artillery and in strategic planning, which took account of the growing realization that everything was decided in movement, not in a state of rest. And if the defensive power of a fortress really was put to the test, then as a rule, and after the squandering of enormous quantities of war material, the outcome remained more or less undecided.”

All of which to say, I’ve been thinking a great deal lately, as I often do, about militarism, architecture, real estate hucksters, fascism, and madness.

Just as Sebald’s Austerlitz sees in these designs an increasing paranoia, so, too, in the conspiracy theories that have since spread like wildfire across the Internet, both about these fortifications and about nearly everything else, one can see a similar desperation, a desire to create ever more elaborate edifices out of thought and stone in an attempt to manage and dominate a world that, both the conspiracist and the warmonger have come to feel, is threatening to slip entirely out of their control.