In his notes on painting, Leonardo da Vinci explained that an ideal visualization of battle should absorb viewers in an experience of sensory overload. In such a scene, the elements are thrown into visual and physical chaos. Cannon smoke swirls through the air, while horses kick up clouds of dust. Arrows and bullets fly about in all directions. Amid this atmospheric tumult, soldiers undergo states of extreme haptic and affective intensity. Some rush forward with confident speed. Others, caked in mud and blood, convulse on the ground in their final, agonizing moments of life. Gaping mouths simulate the anguished screams of the vanquished, giving voice to the audible as well as visible horrors of the battlefield.

Leonardo’s evocative description points to a perennial imperative of warfare: armed combat is, fundamentally, a life-or-death contest for sensory supremacy. To triumph, one side must rise above experiential turbulence, maintaining perceptual clarity (or at least a perceptual advantage) over the enemy in the heat of battle. Obscurity may itself be weaponized, as combatants shroud their opponents in darkness and disorder. At the same time, soldiers strive to be undetectable, pursuing a condition that the theorist of military media Antoine Bousquet has called “becoming imperceptible.”

My discussion here will focus on this final aspect of the sensorium of early modern war, expanding upon ideas raised in my recent book, Form and Fortification: The Art of Military Architecture in Renaissance Italy (Figure 1). For scholars like Bousquet, the pursuit of imperceptibility is an “immanent critique of the martial gaze,” a “praxis that identifies and exploits the inherent biases, lacunae, and blind spots of technicised perception.”[1] In modern times, this praxis has been exemplified by camouflage, a military art and science that arose in dialog with trends in twentieth-century painting. Yet the practice of military dissimulation is far from new. As we’ll see, it led in the Renaissance to fascinating developments in subterranean warfare, which unfolded in tunnels concealed beneath the world of cannon fire and cavalry described by Leonardo.

Fig. 1. Cover of *Form and Fortification: The Art of Military Architecture in Renaissance Italy*, Yale University Press, 2025.

While I find inspiration in the work of Bousquet and others, I want to broaden the experiential frame of reference. In what follows, I depart from the predominant focus in much recent scholarship on the optical dimensions of early modern warfare. Instead, I draw attention to neglected underground soundscapes, focusing on how defenders employed acoustic countermining devices to detect invisible siege miners. To realize these feats, as I’ll show, architects and engineers adapted sound-amplification systems already existent in civilian structures like theaters and churches. These functional translations reveal the polymathic talents and humanistic inclinations of early modern practitioners: figures who acquired knowledge about architectural acoustics from classical texts, and who worked across diverse civilian and military contexts, fluidly transferring forms and techniques among these domains. In the process, they transformed peaceful sonic instruments into weapons of war.

Between the Seen and Unseen

Before exploring warfare’s aural dimensions, I’d like to explain how my discussion both builds on and differs from existing scholarship on the military sensorium. Inspired by visual and media studies as well as the related field of Bildwissenschaft (roughly, “image science”) in the German-speaking world, research on this topic from recent decades has focused on what’s sometimes been called “scopic regimes.” The driving idea here is that sight isn’t simply a natural process. Rather, the human gaze has historically been manipulated, controlled, and enhanced through artificial technologies in the service of dominant political powers. (More radically, some theorists have argued that vision is fundamentally constituted by such technologies and power relations.) This concept has led to scholars to reevaluate historical photographs less as tools of objective documentation than as violent instruments of imperial conquest.

For some scholars, the rationalization and martial instrumentalization of sight in modern technologies like photography had direct roots in Renaissance advancements. Accordingly, historians have explored how precision cartography and land surveying—already in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—served the demands of espionage, territorial expansion, and the planning of sieges and fortifications. Similarly, historians of early modern landscape have discussed how artificial landforms were erected on the battlefield to provide soldiers with raised positions from which to surveil and target their enemies (Figure 2). The intimate links between early modern optical technologies and warfare gave rise to period analogies between sightlines and ballistic trajectories: eyes were thought to emit rays like shot fired from a cannon (Figure 3).

Fig. 2. Artificial hill with offensive artillery. From Girolamo Maggi, “La prima parte della espugnatione delle città e fortezze” (1555). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Fig. 3. Analogy of visual rays to cannon fire emitted from a bastion. Teofilo Gallaccini, “L’idea della fortificatione” (after 1610–31/32). Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, Siena.

In the study of such themes, the perspective of greatest scholarly interest has often been the elevated viewpoint. Just as artificial hills offered soldiers a high prospect from which to dominate their surroundings, maps from the same period provided princes with metaphorical God’s-eye views of the earth, enabling them to control and conquer territories from a notionally aerial vantage. In so doing, Renaissance cartography presaged the kind of airborne vision only later realizable with airplanes and drones. More broadly, such developments are said to have culminated during the seventeenth century in the sweeping garden vistas seen from baroque palaces: vistas that reified the early modern ideology of the all-seeing absolutist ruler.

The interest in scopic regimes (and allied concepts) has opened many rich lines of inquiry for the study of early modern military technology and visual culture. But I wonder if something hasn’t been lost—perceptually speaking—by the prevailing ocularcentric approaches. Indeed, military historians have drawn increasing attention in recent years to non-visual dimensions of twentieth-century combat. They’ve shown, for instance, how modern siren, radio, and stereophonic systems have variously served as mediums of propaganda, protective signals, and weapons of sensory assault. Could such insights be extended to the early modern period? And, relatedly, what non-visual dimensions of experience might reveal themselves if we were to descend from an elevated viewpoint to spaces deep below ground?

After all, the subterranean world was no less significant than the landscape overground as a site of early modern military technical experimentation. Consider the development of explosive mining: the stealth tactic of digging tunnels and filling them with gunpowder charges to destroy fortified structures located directly above (Figure 4). Such tunnel warfare presented peculiar perceptual, environmental, and bodily challenges. How were besiegers to move underground, without an unbridled field of vision? How could military excavators dig their way in the darkness, toward a precise location they could not see? How did they operate in airless, lightless environments that were prone to waterlogging?

To overcome such challenges early modern armies hired metal prospectors and hydraulics specialists to direct military tunnel operations. These civilian technicians boasted rare skills in underground navigation and excavation, skills they had applied to the digging of water mains and of galleries and adits in metalliferous mines. As they transferred these skills to the battlefield, such figures translated and reprogrammed techniques and structures conceived in civilian contexts for new wartime uses. Underground aqueducts, for example, sometimes featured winding channels that strategically slowed and controlled the flow of water (Figure 5). Similar sinuous shapes could also be given to a siege mining tunnel (Figure 6). Here, it served to concentrate the power of the explosion, reducing its leakage from the mine chamber out of the tunnel.

These often unexpected structural and operative resemblances embody what I have called “cognate technologies”: technical artifacts and architectonic forms that share deep structural and operative traits, despite their sometimes radically distinct functions and surface appearances. These artifactual families multiplied in early modernity, as architects and engineers of the period operated in and translated technical and formal solutions across varied realms of design and engineering. As we shall see, these cognate technologies included sound-amplifying devices adapted from civilian to military contexts and back again.

“These functional translations reveal the polymathic talents and humanistic inclinations of early modern practitioners: figures who acquired knowledge about architectural acoustics from classical texts, and who worked across diverse civilian and military contexts, fluidly transferring forms and techniques among these domains.”

Fig. 4. Technique for planting a gunpowder mine under a hilltop fortress. Francesco di Giorgio Martini, “Opusculum de architectura” (ca. 1474–82). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 5. Underground aqueduct (*bottino*) with winding water in Siena, Italy.

Fig. 6. Configuration of an explosive mine. Vannoccio Biringuccio, *De la pirotechnia* (1540). Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC.

Acoustic Defense

Technical translations of this kind were not limited to offensive mining. They also shaped the defensive tactic of intercepting siege mines by means of tunnels known as countermines. In these tunnels, soldiers would confront their underground attackers and engage them in a bloody fight to the death. Countermining also involved drilling vertical aeration holes into the enemy mines to diffuse the force of their detonations. While often excavated ad hoc, countermine systems could also be integrated into permanent fortifications. In these fortifications, interconnected subterranean galleries and chambers provided many points along the wall from which to dig countermine tunnels (Figure 7). These spaces were equipped, in turn, with ceiling openings and rows of ventilation flues that dissipated the fumes of enemy explosions. These systems elaborated upon cognate ventilation technologies found in hospital and domestic architecture, like those used to expel the noxious odors of latrines (Figure 8), to clear the smoke generated by fireplaces and palace kitchens, or to control the amount of steam in bathing chambers.

But before such countermine systems could work, defenders first needed to overcome a major challenge: they had to find out where in the ground the siege miners were hidden. How did they accomplish this?

The answer was sound. During wartime, troops in countermines listened carefully for the onset of invisible enemies. Instruments embedded in these spaces registered and amplified the rumblings of the unwanted excavators. As Leonardo illustrated, dice placed in a drum would rattle with each blow of a miner’s pickaxe (Figure 9). (Elsewhere, the artist extended this idea to subaquatic contexts proposing the use of a blowpipe as an underwater listening tube to locate distant warships.) These were more than theoretical designs. In the 1512 siege of Bologna and the 1522 siege of Rhodes, defenders effectively detected enemy mines by using copper bowls and bells on war drums, which resounded wherever excavators were present. (On the other hand, the meandering paths of siege mining tunnels described above [see Figure 6] may have doubled as a countermeasure against acoustic detection, misdirecting defenders as to the miners’ locations.) Renaissance people marveled at these ingenious military uses of bells and drums, and perhaps even associated them with the ancient myth of Amphion’s lyre, whose music magically caused stones to form a fortified wall around Thebes.

Indeed, early modern tactics of sonic protection drew direct inspiration from classical precedents, especially those discussed by Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture, De architectura. Here, the ancient Roman author described how Trypho of Alexandria suspended “brazen vessels” in countermine tunnels. Once the vessels rang, betraying the position of underminers, Trypho poured boiling water, pitch, hot sand, and human dung onto the attackers. Renaissance engineers may also have found models in cognate amplification systems used in ancient civilian theaters. Just as they could register remote enemy miners, according to Vitruvius, bronze resounding vases located under theater seating could magnify and clarify the voices of actors on a distant stage.

Fig. 7. Countermine ventilation system of the Bastione Ardeatino (1537–42) in Rome. Axonometric diagram by Morgan Ng.

Fig. 8. Sanitary ventilation system of the Ospedale Maggiore (begun 1456) in Milan. Axonometric diagram by Morgan Ng.

Fig. 9. Countermining technique with drum above a siege mine. Leonardo da Vinci, “Supplement to Manuscript B” (1485–1515). Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Paris.

In the interdisciplinary humanistic culture of the Renaissance, such acoustic knowledge circulated freely among both classically educated military leaders and their architects, as well as across diverse functional contexts. Indeed, the sonic instruments deployed in warfare had close parallels in civilian structures such as churches and elite residences. In the grottos of period villas, builders embedded jars to multiply the sounds of rushing water.[2] Similarly, under his exquisite marble choir loft in Florence Cathedral, Donatello added hollow bronze heads possibly meant to improve the singers’ voices (Figure 10).[3] Besides emulating Vitruvius’s brazen theater vessels, the sculptor’s acoustic insertions may have drawn upon a widespread medieval tradition of immuring clay jars in churches (Figure 11): a practice itself likely inspired by the De architectura. (In medieval churches, however, the earthen vessels may have served as much to reduce as to amplify resonance, following a practice of using sound-absorbing empty barrels discussed by Pliny the Elder.)

Apart from imitating classical models, acoustic countermining adapted workaday methods for testing the stability of the earth at construction sites. Before digging foundations, Renaissance builders sometimes placed on the ground objects highly sensitive to agitation, such as basins filled with water, well-tuned lutes, or (once again) dice on drumskins. The builders then pounded the soil around these objects. If unstable soil conditions lay below—water channels, layers of sand, fissures in the bedrock—the objects would vibrate or generate noise. Like their counterparts in countermining, these diagnostic instruments alerted their users to hidden subterranean dangers.

They also echoed procedures in other early modern technical fields for the discovery of submerged features. Sculptors and builders regularly tapped on construction materials, using the sounds produced by them to gauge their consistency and probe inner structural flaws. Hydraulic experts from antiquity onwards sought to locate hidden groundwater by finding certain kinds of vegetation or vapors emerging from the earth’s surface. If the vapors weren’t easily visible, they could be captured as water condensation on objects placed into a pit—an upturned bronze or lead bowl, an unbaked clay pot, or a piece of woolen fleece.[4] Likewise, prospectors believed that oddly colored foliage indicated the presence of a subterranean vein of metal ore, whose warm and hot exhalations emitted transformed the vegetation above. Some alleged that precious veins could be detected by the twisting motions of a forked divining rod. In all instances, secondary natural or physical effects were thought to give signs of invisible, subsurface phenomena.

More generally, countermining tactics alert us to the sonic dimensions of power in the premodern world. Princes could use resonant instruments as much to control their own households as to guard themselves against foreign enemies. Just as they embedded bells and drums in countermine galleries, the rulers’ architects recommending immuring trumpet-shaped listening tubes in palace walls, which would allow their patrons to eavesdrop from a distance on unfaithful courtiers. Whether or not they functioned in reality, these contraptions continued into the seventeenth century to inspire eavesdropping devices of fantastic scale (Figure 12). And they gave rise to a legend about vast subterranean shafts carved in the form of ear canals, which allowed an ancient tyrant, Dionysius of Syracuse, to hear from his hilltop palace the machinations of enemies imprisoned in cells deep below (Figure 13).

Fig. 10. Donatello, choir loft (1433–39) of Florence Cathedral, now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Fig. 11. Acoustic jar in the church of the Chartreuse Notre-Dame-du-Val-de-Bénédiction, Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Fig. 12. Eavesdropping system. Athanasius Kircher, *Phonurgia nova* (1673). Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw.

Fig. 13. The so-called Ear of Dionysius in Syracuse, Italy. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The examples discussed above encourage us to enlarge our understanding of how acoustic technologies traversed disparate functional and sensorial realms of early modernity. Consider Renaissance organ pipes (Figure 14). As metal tubes crafted at varying lengths to produce precise musical tones, these pipes share a surprising affinity with artillery pieces: also metal pipes which, in the early modern period, assumed increasingly standardized calibers with specified projectile ranges (Figure 15). Artillery pieces, in turn, resembled hydraulic pipes. In Renaissance gardens, such pipes were acquiring ever-more sophisticated shapes and dimensions to create varied jets and sound effects, often mimicking the trajectories and noises of cannons and bombs (Figure 16). Whether meant to delight or to destroy, these cognate technologies shared fundamental operative and structural traits as conduits for the expulsion of pressurized substances—whether water, cannon shot, or resonant air.

Such technical translations have continued to proliferate in modern times, as sound remains useful for the detection of enemies, whether high in the air or under the sea and deep below the ground (Figure 17). The acoustic countermine devices of the Renaissance are historical precedents of modern sonar, which uses sound waves to find invisible (often underwater) objects (Figure 18). Applied to antisubmarine warfare in the early twentieth century, sonar has since assumed a great range of non-military applications, from anticollision systems to marine biology to deep-sea cartography. In medical diagnoses, a closely related technology, ultrasound, can probe subsurface health conditions like heart disease.

As in the past, sonic technologies today defy strict functional definitions: the same systems can kill or save lives. Increasingly, such technologies even elide the boundaries between the senses. As sonar and ultrasound are used to generate maps of the seafloor or pictures of human anatomy, they convert acoustic signals into objects of vision.

Fig. 14, Positive organ (detail), probably by Gottfried Fritzsche (1578-1638) and restored by Tobias Defrain. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Fig. 15. Early modern cannons of five different calibers. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, *Encyclopédie*, Tome 22 (1767). ARTFL Project, University of Chicago.

Fig. 16. Sixteenth-century fountain with jets of water emulating artillery fire, at the Villa d’Este, Tivoli. Photo: Flickr (Snuffy).

Fig. 17. Concrete acoustic mirror near Kilnsea Grange, East Yorkshire, UK, designed to concentrate sound from enemy aircraft. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. The device recalls the legendary burning mirrors of Archimedes, allegedly used to destroy warships approaching Syracuse.

Fig. 18. Sonar image from 2012 of a shipwrecked Soviet minesweeper in the Gulf of Finland. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Acknowledgements

For their insights and feedback, my sincere thanks to Nima Farzaneh, Sergio Alarcón Robledo, John Shorb, and members of the Material Culture group organized by Ned Cooke.

Citation

Morgan Ng, “The Soundscape of Renaissance War,” PLATFORM, September 29, 2025.

Notes

[1] Antoine Bousquet, “Becoming (Im)Perceptible: From Scopic Regimes to the Martial Gaze,” in Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, ed. Beryl Pong and Michael Richardson (London: Open Humanities Press, 2024), 40.

[2] Letter of 13 July 1538 from Annibale Caro to Bishop Giovanni Guidiccioni. See Annibale Caro, A fare le lettere col compasso in mano. Antologia delle lettere familiari, ed. Marcello Verdenelli (Pesaro: Metauro, 2009), 109. My thanks to Emanuela Ferretti for this reference.

[3] Amy E. Bloch, “Donatello, Musical Sculpture, and the Shock of Sound,” The Burlington Magazine 161, no. 1400 (2019): 912.

[4] Palladius, 9.8–12; Vitruvius, De Architectura 8.1 and 5–6; Pietro de’ Crescenzi, Ruralia commode, 1.8.2.