Giovanni Branca

Italian engineer and architect

• Born: April 22, 1571
• Birthplace: Sant'Angelo in Lizzola, Pesaro (now in Italy)
• Died: January 24, 1645
• Place of death: Loreto (now in Italy)

Branca’s modern fame rests on his illustration of a steam machine in Le machine (1629). In his own time, Branca was an accomplished architect, engineer, and writer; his two books, both published in 1629, attest to his ability to compile and present technical information to nonprofessional audiences.

Primary fields: Architecture; civil engineering

Primary invention: Steam turbine

Early Life

Giovanni Branca (joh-VAHN-nee BRAHN-kah) was born in Sant’Angelo in Lizzola, a small town in Pesaro (in the region of the Marches), in 1571. As an archival document attests, he was baptized there on April 22, 1571; his father was an otherwise undistinguished “maestro Niccolò.” Nothing else is known about Branca’s early life. Because Branca dedicated his Manuale di architettura (1629; manual of architecture) to Count Cesare Mamiani, who owned the fief adjoined to the castle of Sant’Angelo, some biographers have speculated that this nobleman supported the early education of Branca in Rome, the city to which he was connected throughout his adult life.

In Rome, Branca would have received his elementary education and the rudiments of the mechanical arts, which, in this period, involved the study of classic texts on architecture and mechanics, such as those by Vitruvius, Leon Battista Alberti, and Aristotle. However, the language as well as the technical aspects of his texts do not support the hypothesis that Branca received any advanced schooling or university training. Against this persistent historiographic supposition, it should be noted that the Marches benefited from a strong tradition of mathematical and engineering studies during the sixteenth century, epitomized by the fact that the court of Urbino was home to Federico Commandino and Guidobaldo del Monte.

Life’s Work

After his baptismal certificate, the next surviving document on Branca mentions his 1614 appointment as “architect to the House of Loreto,” a position he kept for the rest of his life. One of his first projects in this papal town outside of Rome, which was also an important pilgrimage site, concerned its aqueduct. Specifically, he was charged with correcting the engineering mistakes made to it by none other than Giovanni Fontana and Carlo Maderno, two leading architects of the Roman scene. In 1614, Branca was also granted Roman citizenship; rather than an honorific recognition, this title offered fiscal and legal advantages. In Loreto, in addition to supervising the building of the town’s main church, Branca oversaw the maintenance and enlargement of the town’s walls, including the addition of two pentagonal bastions to increase Loreto’s defenses.

In 1629, Branca published in Ascoli (a large town in the Marches) his Manuale di architettura, an introductory manual of architecture for aspiring architects and builders. In the first three books of this manual, Branca covers building materials, the classical orders, and general instructions to design and build windows, vaults, stairs, chimneys, and other architectural elements. In the remaining three books, he explains the basic mathematical rules and principles needed by architects. The volume concludes with a series of thirty precepts and rules applicable to the problems of maintaining and changing the course of rivers, a subject on which Branca can claim primacy. Notably, unlike his other publication, this manual enjoyed considerable success, seeing several editions until 1789.

Published in Rome in 1629, Le machine presents seventy-seven figures and is divided into three sections, the first covering machines of diverse kinds; the second, pumps and hydraulic mechanisms; the third, siphons and compressed-air devices. On the page facing each illustration, there is a brief discussion (in both Italian and Latin) of the machine pictured, including its identification and application. As Branca states in the foreword, he does not claim to have invented many of the devices discussed. Generally speaking, Le machine belongs to the literary genre of the “teatri di macchine” (theaters of machines) that emerged during the second half of the sixteenth century. These were not engineering treatises but “coffee-table books” featuring illustrations of machines. Rather than explicating physical and mechanical principles, these books aimed at entertaining readers, as confirmed by the fact that their text and commentaries are often written in Latin, which at the time was not the language of practicing engineers but of the intelligentsia.

Within this genre, Branca’s book distinguishes itself by the following features: It was the first non-luxury publication, it was a small octavo, and its figures are unsophisticated woodcuts. Evidently, Branca understood that this kind of publication had a wider market. Even though the steam machine, the invention for which this book and its author became most famous, is defined as a “wonderful engine”—a qualification partly hinting at the fact that it may not be a real machine—in other instances Branca illustrates models that certainly work in actuality, such as the water pump, a device to raise water. His ingenuity in employing raised water to perform work is demonstrated in figure 20. The Archimedean screw was a device commonly used to raise water; Branca “inverted” its principle: Water runs down the Archimedean screw cylinder, which, by turning, generates the power needed to operate a spinning wheel. Branca presents two applications of steam power. In addition to the steam machine, he envisioned a “smoke turbine”: A wheel is powered by the fumes and hot air produced by a furnace and channeled through a long funnel-like chimney; a series of gears then transmits the motion to the cylinders of a rolling mill that can be used to strike medals or to thin metal bars.

Documents from the 1620’s and 1630’s reveal that Branca was granted lands as well as other public offices to administer the realty in Loreto, while also serving as judge and, eventually, “mayor” from July of 1644. He died on January 24, 1645, at the age of seventy-four.

Impact

Branca is representative of the Renaissance engineer-authors and inventors. His publication on machines epitomizes early modern engineering knowledge, both real and fanciful. Branca’s steam turbine, for which he is famous, is not a practical device. It is based on working principles, but its realization and applicability was impossible because of the extremely precise and durable gears necessary to harness steam power at the pressure and speeds he envisioned. The machine is significant for continuing the intellectual thread that began with Hero of Alexandria (first century c.e.)—inventor of the aeolipile, the first steam engine—and that can be connected to the creation of modern steam machines. Because few of Branca’s illustrations could be or were ever translated into three-dimensional working machines, the impact of his inventions was limited, serving above all as food for thought to stimulate thinking and research about these scientific principles and engineering solutions. In this respect, it is significant that two famous contemporaries owned copies of his machines book—the English natural philosopher Robert Hooke and the Italian architect and artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Bibliography

Keller, Alex. “Renaissance Theaters of Machines.” Technology and Culture 19 (1978): 495-508. Tackles important intellectual issues concerning the history of the “theaters of machines” while also reviewing misconceptions about this genre that are frequently found in the older historiography on the history of technology.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Theatre of Machines. London: Chapman & Hall, 1964. In addition to an informative introduction and biographical accounts of Renaissance engineer-authors, this book presents a sample of illustrations from the “theaters of machines,” including figures from Branca’s work. The commentary is also illuminating.

Lefèvre, Wolfang, ed. Picturing Machines, 1400-1700. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Important collection of essays that examines the role of images and visual representation within the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the history of early modern science and technology. Useful for placing Branca’s work within the scientific and technical context of the seventeenth century.

McPhee, Sarah. “Bernini’s Books.” The Burlington Magazine 142, no. 1168 (2000): 442-448. Describes and comments on the inventory of the library owned by the architect and artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The fact that Branca’s Le machine is one of these 169 volumes is significant because it is testimony to the position of Branca’s work within the intellectual environment of the mid-seventeenth century.

Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. Vol. 7. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Thorndike’s two pages (617-618) on Branca’s book demonstrate above all the difficulty modern historians have in dealing with his work, the technical dimensions of which are easily misunderstood and dismissed as daydreaming, while completely missing the importance of the popular dimension of machines design and of the “theaters of machines” as a literary genre.