After the end of the World War I, the kingdom of Hungary, was – among many other harsh conditions – not allowed to have an armed air force. Aircraft manufacture was completely banned by the Allied as well.

After 1923 the situation improved. Light civilian aircraft were allowed to be built again, but early attempts to build aircraft were not very successful. From March 1927 on, when the strict Allied supervision on Hungary ended, negotiations with foreign aircraft manufacturers were started at once. Secretly, the Dutch company Fokker was already contacted in 1926.

The Dutch aircraft manufacturer Fokker was one of the investigated constructors. A first result was an order for a group of four C.5D reconnaissance planes. The contract was signed on 27 January 1927 and the aircraft were delivered between 20 and 26 June the same year. They were ferried through Austria to Hungary. A next group of four machines was ordered on 28 March 1928. Amongst these, a C.5E was delivered, with a wingspan of 15,3.m, compared to the C.5D’s span of 12,48.m. These aircraft arrived in the spring of 1928.

After testing the C.5D’s would be used as tactical (short range) reconnaissance planes and the C.5E as light bomber. The LÜH (Légügyi Hivatal, the bureau for aeronautical affairs) also decided that the machines were highly suitable for local production. A licence contract was signed in March 1928.

A little while later, on 9 July, the Hungarian company Weiss Manfréd Muvek (WMM) established an aircraft division. This newly formed department would take care of licence production. Rights for aircraft engine production were acquired as well.

Production of one single C.5D and one C.5E started in the second half of 1928. Both were powered by Jupiter VI engines of 520 hp. Performance with this engine was substantially improved. The first machine was completed in December 1928. After trials were completed it was decided that only the C.5D would be built.

During production a number of modifications in the design were applied. Stronger N-struts were used while the undercarriage was replaced by a lighter version of Italian origin. Production was concluded in the fall of 1931. W.M.M. built 49 C.5D’s and a single C.5E.

Fokker had celebrated great successes with the Fokker C.5, which had been sold to the Dutch army aircorps (LVA, or LuchtVaart Afdeling), naval air service (MLD, or Marineluchtvaartdienst), Netherlands Indies air corps (LA, or Luchtvaart Afdeling in Dutch) and no less than thirteen foreign air forces. Licenses had been sold to a number of customers as well. Without doubt, the C.5 was an important product in difficult economic times. By 1930, the C.5 was gradually being overtaken by aeronautical developments, and in 1931 Fokker sent an enquiry for the need of a successor to the LA, which operated 23 Fokker C.5E’s.

A response came, but as late as April of 1933, and only after a Fokker representative visited the LA headquarters. Fokker replied quickly, and sent all information on the Fokker C.10 on July 13th…

DEVELOPED FOR COLONIAL USE

Fokker representative Bruno Stephan visited Andir, Java, from January to March 1934 to promote the C.10 project. This resulted in a contract for a prototype, powered by a 610 HP Rolls Royce Kestrel IIS engine. The contract stipulated, that trials would be concluded by August of 1934. The machine actually made its first flight on October 9th 1934, with the LA registry FCx450. Fokker testpilot Emil Meinecke was at the controls. Seriously behind schedule, the trials were speeded up. Unfortunately, the prototype crashed in heavy fog on December 7th. By that time, Fokker was put under severe pressure by the LA, which threatened to buy aircraft abroad. The LA was keen to place an order, while Fokker could use firm orders to survive. If needed, Fokker would start building series production aircraft at their own risk, with an escape clause in case the first finished plane did not meet expectations. After recalculating the design and negotiations in Batavia, Netherlands Indies (currently Djakarta, Indonesia), an agreement was signed in February 1935 to purchase fourteen examples. The series production aircraft would be equipped with Kestrel V engines with 685 HP takeoff power. These machines would be known as C.10K (K for Koloniën, or colonial). The FCx450, although heavily damaged, was repaired and flight tests were continued in May.

By July, Fokker reported to the national newspapers that the first C.10’s were about to be delivered to the LA. This was far from true, the first series machine became available in August.

The Brewster XF2A-1 naval fighter made its first flight in December 1937 because the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics had reconsidered the idea that monoplane aircraft were unsuitable for aircraft carriers because of their high landing speed. The Brewster F2A-1 was to become the very first U.S. monoplane fighter for use on aircraft carriers. Unfortunately it was already more or less obsolete and retired from first line duty at the U.S. Navy when the Pacific war broke out. It had a very unlucky career when it was used by the U.S. Marines in combat against the Japanese Mitsubishi A6M ‘Zero’ fighter. For this reason some aviation historians consider the Brewster fighter as a failure, but in fact this was undeserved. In the hands of well-trained Finnish air force pilots this stubby little fighter was a great success. Also in the war between the Netherlands East Indies with Japan, the B-339 as it was called by the Dutch was the best fighter they had. It definitely was inferior to the Japanese Zero fighter, but it could absorb a lot of enemy fire before it was downed!

Brewster Aeronautical Corporation:

Brewster & Co was a U.S. based company manufacturing originally carriages. Later they changed their production to automobile bodies. In 1932 James Work purchased the aircraft division of Brewster & Co. He changed the name into Brewster Aeronautical Corporation. The company was based in multi-story urban factory buildings in Long Island City, New York, across the East River from Manhattan. Being an aeronautical engineer, Work started building business with contract work for other aircraft manufacturers such as making wing panels for the PBY Catalina, but already in 1934 Brewster’s design team, headed by Dayton T. Brown, started with the design and construction of their first aircraft. It was a single engine two-seat scout bomber, that received the naval aircraft designation SBA-1. The prototype XSBA-1, Bureau Number 9726, made its first flight on 15 April 1936. Although a small order for 30 machines was placed, these were eventually built by the Naval Aircraft Factory as the SBN-1.

The next type Brown’s team designed was a single seat monoplane fighter. It was clearly based on the SBA-1 having the same type of engine. It was built as an answer to a U.S. Navy requirement for a new shipboard fighter. First flight of the new fighter, designated as the XF2A-1, took place in December 1937.

Birth of a champion

Willy Messerschmitt was the managing director of the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke A.G.. The company, which was based at Augsburg, built various aircraft types mostly of single-engine design. In the economic crisis of the thirties, also Messerschmitt’s company ran into financial difficulties which in 1931 resulted in bankruptcy. Messerschmitt still owned Messerschmitt Flugzeugbau as a dormant company holding all his technical patents. New working capital was borrowed and on 27 April the Regional Court of Augsburg issued a verdict that gave Messerschmitt the opportunity to re-open his factory gates with 85 employees. He received an order from Romania to build a small series of light passenger aircraft but the German Ministry of Aviation RLM (Reichsluftfahrtministerium) refused permission to build them.

The RLM was of opinion that the new development and production capacity had to be strictly used for Germany.

In compensation Willy Messerschmitt received a contract for the development and construction of a single engine aircraft to compete in a fighter contest between the various aircraft manufacturers. This opportunity would have far-reaching consequences! Although Messerschmitt had no practical experiences in designing fighters, he had a sound basis with the all-metal Messerschmitt Bf 108 4-seat light plane. This was of modern light-alloy monocoque construction with a fully retractable main undercarriage.

A little-known painting formerly in Farnese holdings and now in the Galleria Nazionale in Parma has been identified as the portrait of “Giangiovetta,” a dwarf affiliated with the Farnese ducal court (figure 8.1). The work was executed in 1606 by the Flemish painter Johann Gersmueter, who produced two other portraits around the same time for Ranuccio Farnese, then ruling as duke of Parma and Piacenza (r. 1592–1622). Although precise records pertaining to the commissioning of the “Giangiovetta” portrait are not extant, in an article published in 1992, Giuseppe Bertini traced the work to inventories made in 1641 and 1653 at the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, which cited a “Giovangiovetta” by name. Using the shortened version of the name as it subsequently appeared in the 1680 inventory, Bertini then linked “Giangiovetta” to the dwarf Giovanni Gioietta, referenced in court documents for 1597 and 1599, thus leading him to confirm the identity of the sitter in Gersmueter's painting. The validity—and scholarly acceptance—of this assessment notwithstanding, viewers might be hard-pressed to see in the portrait the figure of a dwarf, much less one who would have been deemed “proportionate.”

Taking Bertini's article as a point of departure, this essay advances a new interpretation of the work known officially as the Ritratto del nano Giangiovetta (Portrait of the Dwarf Giangiovetta).

In St. Nicholas Church in Merano, South Tyrol, a fifteenth-century colossal painted image of St. Christopher bearing Christ on his shoulders, and measuring about ten meters in height, features above the southern entrance, reaching the roof (figure 2.1). In his right hand the saint holds the miraculously blooming staff, one of his traditional attributes, taken from the fifth- and sixth-century written legends. As a later addition, a mermaid is shown between Christopher's feet as he straddles a river (figure 2.2). Such paintings of Christopher bearing Christ were highly popular in Europe in general and in the Alps in particular between the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. Indeed, Christopher's popularity led to a change in his longstanding literary image. Whereas in the visual arts in South Tyrol he had been portrayed as a giant already during the twelfth century, in his vitae and written legends his transformation into a giant occurred only during the thirteenth century. Moreover, while depictions of Christopher are usually located in the interior of a church, in the Alps they are mostly located on the exterior of buildings erected along Alpine roads, intentionally positioned on the particular side of a building that enables the image to function in concert with its mountain backdrop. I would like to suggest that these images, set against the background of imposing nature, are manifestations of this period's notion of the sublime.

In May 1511, Margaret Tudor (1489–1541), queen of James IV of Scotland (1473–1513), was welcomed into the royal burgh of Aberdeen with a visually stunning triumphal entry. The commemorative poem Blyth Aberdein (Rejoice Aberdeen, 1511) by court poet William Dunbar (1460–1520) is the only detailed account of the entry and it mentions the oversized figure of a giant among the pageants and spectacles devised by the civic organizers. In Dunbar's words, “And next the Bruce, who was always fearless in battle / [is called and] comes forward riding as a crowned King / supremely aweinspiring, physically powerful, and [represented] with a massive physique / as a renowned, fearsome, almighty champion.” The large-bodied character was the warrior nobleman Robert the Bruce (1274–1329), who led the Scots to victory in the First War of Scottish Independence (1296–1328) against England before being crowned king in 1306. The Bruce thus came to represent Scottish proud national identity and the right to self-government, and the royal House of Stewart, of which James IV himself was part, descended directly from the Bruce.

Scholars of Scottish spectacle have acknowledged that the Bruce as he appeared in Aberdeen in 1511 was a giant, rationalizing his size as representative of his towering role in Scottish identity, as a larger-than-life national hero.

My purpose in this chapter is to explore portraits of the royal family and their dwarfs at the Spanish Habsburg courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Conventionally, encounters between the two have been presented as a binary with the “normal/ideal” body of the elite figure at one extreme and the “anomalous,” non-standard dwarf at the other. However, the royal family's own impairments complicate who exactly is “normal” in this context, bearing in mind that “normal” is a modern term for what was conceptualized in the early modern period as everyday phenomena on the one hand and uncommon phenomena on the other. It is important to recognize that ideas about bodies—like the language we use to describe them—are not fixed, but extremely fluid, and culturally specific. It is useful, therefore, to embrace the flexible, early modern approach, whereby the difference between “regular” and “anomalous” bodies was a matter of degrees rather than absolutes. An assessment of the portraits can shed light on these complex issues, not least by revealing what aspects of a dwarf's role and appearance were deemed worthy of memorialization on canvas and which were excluded.

In Spanish courts, dwarfs were counted among the gente de placer (literally “people of pleasure”), whose number included people of average height who entertained with a mixture of physical and verbal humor, and the locos—a loose category that embraced the talkative as well as the genuinely insane.

Published in 1868, Edward Wood's Giants and Dwarfs is a treasure trove of facts and legends about giants and dwarfs that range from the real to the improbable to the downright impossible. He tells us of biblical giants like the Nephilim who commingled with the daughters of men, and the mighty Goliath who was eight to twenty feet tall and killed by David. Among the mythological giants, the Cyclops Polyphemus lived in a cave and fed upon human flesh, with Antaeus of Libya meeting his match in his battle with Hercules. In Roman times the emperor Maximinus Thrax (the Thracian, r. 235–38) was said to have topped almost nine feet, his hands so large he used his wife's bracelet for a thumb-ring. Over a thousand years later it was claimed that the Dutch giant Nicholas Kieten could carry men under his arms as if they were children, and that four people could stand together in one of his massive shoes. Dwarfs, too, were described in equally fantastic terms. Conflated with the mythical pygmies of the monstrous races, they were similarly reputed to live in caves and likewise did battle with Hercules (after he defeated Antaeus with whom they had claimed an alliance). Of actual dwarf individuals, the grammarian and poet Philetas of Cos (ca. 340–ca. 270 BCE) was reputed to be so small and slender he had to keep lead in his pockets to keep from being blown away.

Abstract

Colossal statues like Michelangelo's David were often referred to as “il Gigante” (the Giant), a genre tied to heroic ancient traditions. One Florentine “Gigante,” Bartolomeo Ammannati's Neptune (1560–74) in the Piazza della Signoria, suffered criticism for its aesthetic shortcomings and acquired a popular nickname, “Biancone,” translated as “Big White One” (or “Giant Whitey”). This paper will trace its appearance in Lorenzo Lippi's Il Malmantile Racquistato (1676) where “Biancone” appears as an anti-hero, conquered and subjected to indignities. Lippi's work drew on earlier traditions that celebrated the vulgar, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque, pairing giants and dwarfs for comic effect. As statue and literary character, “Biancone” presents a colorful and humorous case study in the dynamics of Florentine public sculpture.

Keywords: Bartolomeo Ammannati, Neptune Fountain, Lorenzo Lippi, Malmantile Racquistato, mock heroic, colossal statues

A giant among giants, Bartolomeo Ammannati's Neptune stands as the centerpiece of a sumptuous fountain (1560–74) in the Piazza della Signoria of Florence (figures 11.1–11.3). Colossal statues such as this, like Michelangelo's celebrated David set up originally in this same piazza, were often referenced by just the term gigante. Ammannati's Olympian deity of the waters was carved from a single white marble block, the largest of its time and a revival of an ancient and highly esteemed genre of sculpture that showcased the technical skill of the artist and the monumental ambitions and power of a patron. However, its negative reception over the ages proves that bigger is not always better. While it was not the only statue in the piazza to be mocked by its public, it enjoys the dubious honor of having a catchy and popular nickname: “Biancone” (translated literally as “Big White One”, colloquially as “Big Whitey”). The very word employs the augmentative suffix -one with bianco, turning largeness and whiteness on their heads and using the term “Biancone” as a satirical critique. This study investigates the earliest known printed appearance of this nickname in Lorenzo Lippi's Il Malmantile Racquistato (The Castle Malmantile Regained, 1676), a mock-heroic epic that highlights words and phrases from the Florentine vernacular. Here and elsewhere, I explore the flip side of the heroic tradition associated with such colossi, one which casts giants in the domain of the grotesque, the evil, and the ridiculous.