Fausto Veranzio, the bishop who invented the parachute
If Leonardo Da Vinci had already hypothesized the first parachute like a cone of canvas useful for a “soft” descent from above, at the end of the sixteenth century he developed the “Homo volans”, a project much more similar to the current paraglider. He was a man of letters, a philosopher, a historian. He was a bishop and lexicographer. But he is the author mainly for being the Machinae, a volume printed in Venice in 1615 which includes 49 technological innovations, more or less in every sector then known, excellently illustrates and accompanies by a description in five: Italian, Latin, German, Spanish , French. He, Fausto Veranziohe was not born in Venice. Coming from a family that is the homeland of scholars of Sibenik, Dalmatian town then part of the Republic of Venice, was born on that shore of the Adriatic on January 1, 1551 to Michele (Mihovil) Vrancich, poet and diplomat of the kingdom of Hungary, and to Caterina Dobroevich, also descendant of a notable family. After an initial education and the start of classical studies in his hometown, thanks to his uncle Antonio Veranzio, then bishop of Eger, Fausto Veranzio then trained in Bratislava (the then capital of Hungary known, also as Pozsony or Pressburgo), humanistic center of great stature, to finalize its laws between Venice and Padua, where between 1568 and 1572 I studied law and philosophy.
Deepening Aristotelian thought and mathematics, without disdaining engineering and mechanics. To his uncle bishop – who at one point was appointed chancellor for Hungary and Transylvania – he owed a lot: he traveled the length and breadth of Europe with him; he stayed in Prague at the court of Rudolf II, where he came into contact with John Kepler and Tycho Brahe. After his uncle’s death, he moved to the Illyrian college of San Girolamo in Rome and in 1579 he was appointed administrator of the bishop’s property in Veszprém, in Hungary. The previous year he had married Maria Zar, with whom he had had a daughter and a son.
The premature death of his wife in 594 led Veranzio to abandon the imperial secretariat for some time and move to Venice and, admitted, to Sibenik. She decides to marry the priesthood. In those same years he also resumed his studies; in 1595 he published in Venice the “Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europae linguarum, Latinae, Italicae, Germanicae, Dalmaticae et Ungaricae”, a work of great linguistic significance.
In 1598 he was elected bishop of Csanad, and moved to Hungary. But ten years later he resigned from office ethe decorated first in Rome and then in Venice where he resumed the study of science.
His most important works refer to this third period of his life: those of an ethical, logical and religious nature, written in Dalmatic and subsequently gathered together in the “Logica nova” of 1616 (including an unfinished “History of Dalmatia”) , and those related to his activity as an inventor. Already in 1590 he had obtained a patent from the Senate of Venice for a multifunctional grinding wheel or mill: this inventive vein was collected in the “Machinae novae”, a review of technical inventions of various kinds, in which 56 of various machinery and devices are depicted, constructions, plants, structures and buildings.
Not all inventions can be said to be created by Veranzio, who put into practice the knowledge accumulated during his stays in various European countries; but certainly the volume is striking for the great heterogeneity of arguments: navigation systems, mills, tools for threshing grain, models of boats and water wells, cableways, grinders, clocks, dredging systems, but above all bridges – suspended or cable-stayed – and precisely the parachute.
In present-day Croatia the name of Fausto Veranzio it is still today linked to the highest national recognition in the technical-technological field. During his wanderings, in 1616 Veranzio decided to leave Rome and return to Dalmatia. He died in Venice, where he had stopped passing, on January 27, 1617. He was buried on the island of Provicchio, in front of Sibenik, for him he expressed his will.