Menace and defense. Creative fortification in town models

How would a city deal with menaces in previous ages? Which creative solutions did the art of fortification provide? Models of the five most important Bavarian Renaissance towns provide visual answers.

Fortifications of towns, castles or garrisons had to keep pace with the development of firearms since these came up – until this was no longer possible and corseting walls, useless for defence, were demolished. Their disposition in the Renaissance and Baroque ages had been a proper subject in architecture, comprising not only aspects of defense engineering but also aesthetical ones. The development of the art of fortification can be studied in the models of the cities of Munich, Landshut, Ingolstadt, Burghausen and Straubing, which were built at the court of Duke Albrecht V. of Bavaria in the years from 1568 to 1574. In an adjacent hall in the museum, the arms of besiegers and defenders like shields, grenade launchers and archebuses can also be contemplated.
There are facts suggesting present day comparison, like the economical upturn of the „National Fortress“ of Ingolstadt after increasing ist armament in the 17th Century, or the fact that King Ludwig I. did not only declare town gates and walls listed monuments after they had survived defortification, but, for Munich, also planned a new walling that was obsolete in terms of defence and actually bore other functions.