La Lomellina by Louie da fly - scale 1:100 - Theoretical Reconstruction of a Genoese carrack sunk in 1516

[MikkiC]

I enjoy those pics as I do so like the great arch.

French....I never learned it. Spanish, Italian, a little Latin and I'm in. I always felt like there were way more syllables on the page than being spoken in French. 😁

[Louie da fly]

Made another frame. They don't take as long to do as I'd feared.

I've been concerned about the shapes of the frames at the bow and stern. Because the model is based on a wreck which is very far from complete I'd had to generate its lines  from the remnants and from the lines of other ships of the same general time-frame (notably the Mary Rose, God bless 'er), and then use those lines to work out the shapes of the frames, and all this the first time I'd ever tried it, there was a fair bit of uncertainty. What if I've got the shapes wrong? Do all that work making them, waste all that wood - only to find they're wrong? So I cut out their shapes from card and put them (very!) roughly in place on the keel. They seem to work, so I feel better about going ahead with them when the time comes.

Steven

Edited January 25 by Louie da fly

[Baker]

Drawing your own frames and hoping they fit is always exciting.

looks good to me

[Louie da fly]

On 1/25/2025 at 6:05 AM, MikkiC said:

I always felt like there were way more syllables on the page than being spoken in French.

I always felt that way about Italian. Look at the way "non piu andrai" from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro is sung . . . sounds like 'non pyandrai' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1-FKyOTvto

 

And just relax and enjoy the music. Love it.

 

Steven

[MikkiC]

Mozart is one of my favorites. I know the Marriage of Figaro well. I've played it many times.

[Louie da fly]

I know this is a bit off-topic, but I'm curious. When you say you've "played it", you mean played an instrument in an orchestra for the opera?

 

Steven

Edited January 27 by Louie da fly

[MikkiC]

Yep. I was a classically trained woodwind player in a local orchestral band. I was not in the city's (Pittsburgh) symphony. 

[Louie da fly]

Great opera. Lots of fun. I played violin in a youth orchestra for some years when I was a nipper. Too many years ago to be comfortable 😁

 

Steven

[Louie da fly]

More on the Lomellina - The rabbet carved into the keel, curved at the corner where the keel joins the sternpost. Oak really isn't a terribly suitable wood for this work.

And the keel with rudder and four frames. Only 84 frames to go!

 

Because of a design conflict between the archaeological finds and the recent theoretical reconstruction, I'd thought I needed to move the lower deck downwards , but as it turned out I had the height correct in relation to the frames. But I did have to adjust the deck heights on the sheer plan, and consequently the heights of the gunport and the pump lands, the gunwale etc. All good.

 

Steven 

[Ferrus Manus]

88 frames!! Do you really even need planking at that point? 

[Louie da fly]

Oh, yes! I'm duplicating the frame spacing on the original. The distance between centres is about 500mm (a bit over 1 ft 6 in).

 

The planking is actually fairly thin in the grand scheme of things. Ten to 12 cm ( 3 to 5 inches) except on the upper works, where they are about 4 cm (about one and a half inches) thick. That translates at 1:100 scale as 1.0 to 1.2 mm (1/25 to 1/20 inch) and 0.4mm (1/60 inch).

 

Steven

[Louie da fly]

I've been thinking about whether or not the ship should have a poop deck. Botticelli's Judgment of Paris is one of the very few images that show a carrack from a viewpoint that shows the decks, and he shows one. 

It's also a good guide to where the hatches are and various other interesting details. But I think he's made a mistake with the location of the ladder to the poop - it seems to be in a completely illogical place - with the bottom at an open hatch and the top at a set of crossbeams you'd have to clamber over to get to the poop. Perhaps he did his sketch a bit wrong? He's not noted for his maritime pictures and may not have thought through what he was painting. It's hard to make out if there's a separate quarterdeck or the "main" deck continues all the way from the forecastle to the poop deck. Those railings to the main deck are unusual, as well, apparently continuing the same line as the railing at the poop.

 

Needs some thought.

 

Steven

[Tony Hunt]

It is indeed a wonderfully detailed image from a very useful vantage point - if only you could trust the details!  In addition to the anomalies you point out, the cross-wise planking on the poop seems a bit strange too!

[Knocklouder]

 Looks like the main railing is lower on the top and at the bottom  what ever that is in front of the boat blocks the veiw of railing. Making it look all one peice.  Maybe. 

.Bob M.

[Louie da fly]

20 hours ago, Tony Hunt said:

if only you could trust the details!  In addition to the anomalies you point out, the cross-wise planking on the poop seems a bit strange too!

Yes, wonderful artist though Botticelli was, I'm not sure he was au fait with the intricacies of ship design. I know of only one other painting of his that incorporates a ship, and it's identical to this one - obviously working off the same sketch. I'm not so sure about the crosswise planking on the poop. It is within the bounds of possibility that this is correct. The poop is a separate structure from the rest of the hull. Though it does seem to make sense that the deck beams would go from side to side, in fact if they went fore and aft they would be spanning a smaller distance and so they could be made of lighter timber. The only heavy timber needed then would be the one that supported their ends, at the break of the poop.

 

18 hours ago, Knocklouder said:

Looks like the main railing is lower on the top and at the bottom  what ever that is in front of the boat blocks the veiw of railing. Making it look all one peice.  Maybe.

Agreed. It's very difficult to interpret. I'll be looking at other pictures of carracks and see if I can make sense of it. If not, I'll go with what the majority show. It's a judgment call, I'm afraid, as are so many other things in this build.

 

Here's a picture that might explain the configuration. The rail seems to be almost continuous but not quite, and there are definite breaks at the quarter deck and the poop.

And another where the railing is definitely continuous, but perhaps there's no poop.

I think there was a fair bit of variation in the configurations in use. Still thinking about it all.

 

Steven

Edited February 6 by Louie da fly

[Cathead]

On 2/6/2025 at 4:12 PM, Louie da fly said:

Yes, wonderful artist though Botticelli was, I'm not sure he was au fait with the intricacies of ship design

Not just a long-ago problem. I based my 1850s steamboat Arabia in part on a modern painting of the vessel (artist's interpretation since no contemporary images exist), and while the guy is a wonderful historic artist, he's not a steamboat expert and there are a few blatant errors including one almost M.C. Escher level one that can't work in the real world even though it looks nice on canvas. All part of the fun of recreating history from art!

[Louie da fly]

There's a very interesting paper that has a section on interpreting artistic representations of ships and where that can go wrong (see pp. 28-31). Very informative, as is the rest of the paper itself.

 

Maritime_Technological_Change_in_the_Anc.pdf

[Cathead]

That's a great read, thanks!

[Alvb]

yes, if the text was also available in German...

[Louie da fly]

Sorry, Alvb. I do understand your pain.

 

I've experienced the same problem myself - in fact I'm currently on a very long process of translating the annual archaeological reports (about ten of them) of the Lomellina from their original French. I speak a little of the language, but not enough for fluent reading of technical maritime papers, so I'm making great use of Google Translate, plus a French-English dictionary of maritime terminology. Despite Google's many faults, it's a great help.

 

Oh, and seven frames now complete. Unfortunately the main delay is waiting for the glue to dry between putting on one futtock and the next. Putting two on at the same time is a recipe for disaster - you generally end up with both out of alignment. 

Steven

Edited February 9 by Louie da fly

[Louie da fly]

14 frames complete. The shape of the vessel is starting to make itself known.

I'm currently agonising over the cannons (yes, I know its a bit previous to be doing that at this stage, but that's me.) So 15 guns were found associated with the wreck, but only two will be behind gunports (as that appears to have been the way it was in the very early days of gunports - see earlier posts). So what happens with the other 13? Are they on big wheels so they reach over the gunwale?

 

And then there are several guns retrieved in 1531, one of which was a large bronze perrier (meaning the balls it shot were of stone), and there were a number of swivels. Also several wrought iron guns of different types, one type very long compared with its calibre. Unless I much mistake, except for swivels, all the wrought iron guns needed to be deck-mounted because they weren't structurally strong enough to support themselves. But that would presuppose gunports unless they had big wheels. There were a number of big wheels found on board, some of 120 cm diameter, some of 148. This would mean a gunwale of somewhere between 60 and 80 cm high if they were to poke out above it. That's 2 feet to about 2 ft 7 in. Not terribly high. Sigh. I'm in a bit of a quandary.

 

It's assumed that between 1516 when she sank and the retrieval of 1531 the citizens of Nice may well have plundered the wreck for cannons, but there's no written record of that.

 

Swivels could be in arched openings shown to the forecastle in Carpaccio's paintings, or even in the aftercastle as shown in others. It's a matter of deciding what goes where. Though she was a merchant ship, it looks like the Lomellina was upgunned when she was hired by the King of France to transport munitions. And perhaps some (or all?) of the guns were cargo rather than armament? 

 

Oh, and they recovered two bronze arquebuses (precursor of the musket, but considerably heavier construction.)

 

It's a problem at the moment, and any solution I come up with is going to involve a tremendous amount of speculation and guesswork. I'm trying to make it educated guesswork.

 

Steven

 

Steven

[MikkiC]

Your work is really nice and precise.

 

Should we start a round? 74 frames he needs to make. 74 needs to be made. He makes one more and then a door. 73 frames he needs to make? Or something like that.😁 You did say 88 frames total, right? 

[Louie da fly]

9 hours ago, MikkiC said:

You did say 88 frames total, right? 

Yes, but I may decide it's all too much. We'll see. Maybe only 44 instead . . .  That would leave only 30 to make.

 

I'm doing an average of about one a day - so that would mean 74 days (well, 73 now - I just made another one) - just about two and a half months. That's not too bad.

 

Steven

Edited Tuesday at 07:21 AM by Louie da fly