A Renaissance Depiction of a Tornado

Abstract

A Flemish tapestry demonstrates how weather in sixteenth-century art can be of testimonial, decorative, or emblematic character.

Ball lightning: a Renaissance account from Zafra (Spain)

“…Two other notable, and more recent, works are the collective volume edited by Navarro Brotóns and Eamon (2007) and the book by Portuondo (2009). With respect to singular meteorological phenomena, an early graphical representation stands out of a tornado and other meteorological events in a collection of 16th century tapestries of Belgian origin, a territory under the Spanish crown at the time (Hoinka and de Castro, 2005).…”

Tornadoes and waterspouts in Catalonia (1950–2009)

“…Blokland, 1965). But, sometimes, they included a mythical or supernatural assessment, as in the case of a tornado near Montserrat presented by Hoinka and Castro (2005), or the severe whirl cited as a snake in the historical work written by Juan de Mariana (1737) as a "precursor" of the defeat of Hannibal against the Roman army around the mouth of the Ebro River (c. 205 BC).…”

Was the earliest documented account of tornado dynamics published by an Indian scientist in an Indian journal?

“…The spatial and temporal scales of the tornado matched those given in papers published more than 100 years later by Orlansky () and Fujita (), and it is possible that it constitutes the first meteorological record in which the horizontal scale of a tornado and its suction spot were accurately evaluated. To the authors’ knowledge, no other accurate historical depictions of tornadoes were produced, even in Europe and America, and representations of the phenomenon are limited to artistic or emblematic portrayals in the form of frescoes, tapestries or mosaics during the European Renaissance period (1400–1600) and beyond (Bradford, ; Hoinka et al, ). These aspects differentiate the paper from other tornado‐related articles published elsewhere in the world during or before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.…”