A Renaissance Depiction of a Tornado
A RENAISSANCE DEPICTION OF A TORNADO BY KLAUS P. HOINKA AND MANUEL DE CASTRO A Flemish tapestry demonstrates how weather in sixteenth-century art can be of testimonial, decorative, or emblematic character. uring the Renaissance (1400–1600) meteorologi- discoveries of new lands and seas, which consider- cal phenomena attracted the interest of dil- ably enlarged and widened old ideas and concep- D etantes and artists. Interest in the weather ex- tions. Atmospheric phenomena never seen before pressed itself in the form of individual weather notes were identified by Western explorers, and climates (see Hellman 1901), the first serious attempts to pro- that were very different from those at home became vide some rules for predicting the weather (Hellmann known (Hellmann 1908). Among these new me- 1915, 1924a), and the well-established astrometeo- teorological phenomena, tornadoes and waterspouts rological approaches to forecasting the weather. The provoked considerable interest due to their damaging Renaissance period saw increasing attention toward effects, as well as their beauty. For centuries, the con- meteorological observations, in comparison to the cept of tornadoes was indistinguishable from people’s preceeding centuries where meteorology was domi- notions of other windstorms. The word “tornado” nated by Aristotle’s “Meteorologica” (3400 b.c.). The had an archaic meaning concerning variable, gusty invention of quantitative measuring devices, such as winds and rain, and, perhaps, thunderstorms near the thermometer (in 1607) and the barometer (1643), the equator. was yet to come. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) defines a The fresh stimulus for weather observations came tornado in the following way: “In the 16th century at the end of the fifteenth century from the great navigators called a tornado (or ternado) a violent thunderstorm of the tropical Atlantic, with torren- tial rain, and often with sudden and violent gusts of AFFILIATIONS: HOINKA—Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre, wind .
[Show full text]