Veranzio's masterwork,
Machinae Novae (Venice 1615 or 1616), contained 49 large pictures depicting 56 different
machines, other
devices, and technical
concepts. Two variants of this work exist, one with the
"Declaratio" in Latin and Italian, the other with the addition of three other languages. Only a few copies survived and they often do not present a complete text in all the five languages. This book was written in Italian,
Spanish,
French, and
German. The tables represent a varied set of the projects, designs, and conceptions of the author. There Veranzio wrote about water and solar energy, offering depictions of clocks, including a "universal clock" (Plates 6–7), many types of mills, agricultural machinery, various types of bridges in various materials, machinery for clearing the sea, a dual sedan chair borne by a mule (Plate 47), special coaches, and
Homo Volans (Plate 38), a forerunner of the parachute. His ideas included a float resembling a modern
lifebuoy (Plate 39), boats with ingenious power mechanisms relying on water currents (Plates 40 and 41), and a rotary printer (Plate 46) intended to improve on the
printing press. Despite the extraordinary rarity of this book (because the author published it at his own expense, without a publisher, and had to stop printing for want of funds),
Veranzio's parachute One of the illustrations in
Machinae Novae is a sketch of a
parachute dubbed
Homo Volans ("The Flying Man"). Having examined
Leonardo da Vinci's rough
sketches of a parachute, Veranzio designed one of his own.
Paolo Guidotti had already attempted to carry out the idea, ending by falling on a house roof and breaking his thigh bone (about 1590); but while
Francis Godwin was writing his flying romance
The Man in the Moone, Fausto Veranzio is widely believed to have performed an actual parachute-jumping experiment and, therefore, to be the first man to build and test a parachute. According to legend, Veranzio, in 1617, at over sixty-five years of age, implemented his parachute design and tested it by jumping from
St Mark's Campanile in Venice. This event was documented some 30 years later in the book
Mathematical Magick or, the Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry (London, 1648), written by
John Wilkins, the secretary of the
Royal Society in London. But in his book, where Wilkins wrote about flying and the possibility of human flight, methods of slowing down people's fall through the air were not his concern. His treatise does not even mention Veranzio by name, nor does it document any jump by parachute or any event at all in 1617. 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. Veranzio also designed the concept to modern
tied-arch bridges,
through arch bridges,
truss bridges and
aerial lifts. File:Pons ferrevs by Faust Vrančić.jpg|Drawing of suspension
cable-stayed bridge by Fausto Veranzio in his
Machinae Novae File:Suspension bridge fausto veranzio.jpg|Drawing of a suspension bridge by Fausto Veranzio (
Machinae Novae) File:Through arch bridge and tied arch bridge.jpg|Early design of a tied-arch/through arch bridge by Fausto Veranzio File:Faust vrancic arch bridge wood.jpg|Truss arch bridge by Fausto Veranzio File:Early design of truss bridge.jpg|Primitive design of an early truss bridge by Fausto Veranzio File:Aerial lift design by Fausto Veranzio.gif|Design for an aerial lift by Fausto Veranzio (
Machinae Novae)
Lexicography of the
Dictionarium quinque lingarum Veranzio was the author of a five-language
dictionary,
Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europæ linguarum, Latinæ, Italicæ, Germanicæ, Dalmatiæ, & Vngaricæ, published in Venice in 1595, with 5,000 entries for each language:
Latin,
Italian,
German, the Dalmatian vernacular (in particular, the
chakavian dialect of
Croatian) and
Hungarian. These he called the "five noblest European languages" ("
quinque nobilissimarum Europæ linguarum"). The
Dictionarium is a very early and significant example of both Croatian and Hungarian lexicography, and contains, in addition to the parallel list of vocabulary, other documentation of these two languages. In particular, Veranzio listed in the
Dictionarium 304 Hungarian words that he deemed to be
borrowed from
Croatian. Also, at the end of the book, Veranzio included Croatian language versions of the
Ten Commandments, the
Lord's Prayer, the
Ave Maria and the
Apostles' Creed. In an extension of the dictionary called
Vocabula dalmatica quae Ungri sibi usurparunt, there is a list of Proto-Croatian words that entered the
Hungarian language. The book greatly influenced the formation of both the Croatian and Hungarian
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),
Pozsony (1834), and in
Zagreb (1971). The work was an important source of inspiration for other European dictionaries such as a Hungarian and Italian dictionary written by
Bernardino Baldi, a German
Thesaurus polyglottus by
humanist and
lexicographer Hieronymus Megiser, and multilingual
Dictionarium septem diversarum linguarum by
Peterus Lodereckerus of Prague in 1605.
History and philosophy Only a few of Veranzio's works related to history remain:
Regulae cancellariae regni Hungariae and
De Slavinis seu Sarmatis in Dalmatia exist in manuscript form, while
Scriptores rerum hungaricum was published in 1798. In
Logica nova ("New logic") and
Ethica christiana ("Christian ethics"), which were published in a single Venetian edition in 1616, Veranzio 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. ==Legacy==