According to a nineteenth-century transcription of a lost ledger, the Neapolitan Book of Armaments (libro degli armamenti) was authored in 1474 by a not very well-known court painter, Giosuè Cantelmo. Like a sketchbook, it is devoid of written text, containing only 135 drawings of different guns of various sizes: only a few words on its last page – “the book of artillery on the shelf of vernacular manuscripts” – prove that it belonged to the library of the Aragonese sovereigns of Naples. It is not clear why King Ferrante decided to commission this extravagant piece of art, the very first of its kind. The poor quality of the paper and the rudimentary style of the illustrations do not match the description of a luxurious diplomatic gift. And if it were an inventory, the evident lack of information, data, and addenda made the codex quite useless for routine inspections.
Apparently, then, the book had no practical purpose. Its meaning and function, however, become more consistent in the cultural milieu of Renaissance Italy, a context characterized by the creation, consumption, and celebration of objects that combined beauty and functionality, art and engineering – exactly like the giant bronze bombards (), the most characteristic weapons of the time. These new guns were deemed a
