Midlander65 | 12 Dec 2015 11:56 p.m. PST |
I have been making various pieces of 15mm scenery to go with my 16th C Italian Wars French army. One of the things I wanted was a vineyard but all the commercial ready-made ones I could find and the online tutorials showed modern style lines of vines grown on wire. Obviously cheap 100m rolls of galvanised wire wouldn't have been available in the pre-industrial world so I thought a different look was needed. I saw some small vineyards on holiday, with individual, free-standing vines and used that as inspiration. I particularly wanted to capture the twisted, convoluted look of old vines so used short lengths of wire twisted and bent as the armatures than glued these in rows to strips cut from some left-over flexible bathroom flooring.
The bases were finished off with flexible decorators filler and decorated with grit and sand, as my usual figure basing method and foliage added using Woodland Scenics clumping foliage, run through a kitchen blender to make the clumps smaller.
The finished strips are shown here on one of my multi-purpose terrain area pieces that could be an open or enclosed field, orchard, plantation… depending on what marker pieces are used.
smallitalianwars.blogspot.co.uk |
Early morning writer | 13 Dec 2015 12:55 a.m. PST |
Nicely done -though I wonder if the older vineyards were more on trellises. Don't know. Maybe just table grapes versus wine grapes. But nice. |
Swampster | 13 Dec 2015 4:20 a.m. PST |
"wonder if the older vineyards were more on trellises." Various ways of growing vines were used – Pliny describes some of them in Roman times. Trees could be used for support. Other vines were sturdy enough to be self supporting and some trailed on the ground. Ground level vines can be seen on Santorini, though here they are curled round to create a microclimate in the centre of the bush. Poles or ropes were used before wire. See here for ropes combined with trees (possibly dead but I think just heavily pruned).
This page also shows the use of horizontal poles as well as free standing and other forms of cultivation from the Middle ages to the present. |
BigRedBat | 13 Dec 2015 12:26 p.m. PST |
The vineyards are really nice. I also made some overhead vineyards for ancient Roman gaming; bamboo stakes, hemp string and clump foliage.
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Midlander65 | 13 Dec 2015 12:38 p.m. PST |
Thanks very much for those comments. I had tried to find some 14th-16th Century references before making these without success and just fell back on what looked "reasonable". Somebody must have researched 16th Century Italian viniculture so the definitive information must be out there, just beyond my time-limited ability to find it. Swampster: where and when is the picture from? It looks a very interesting and distinctive style, like nothing I have seen before with twin ropes and dead / heavily pruned trees. If it is at all related to 16th Century Italy, I might have a go at modelling it. Big Red Bat: I do like those vines. I wonder whether that style might have survived through to Renaissance Italy? I really should have posted on here before rather than after. |
Druzhina | 13 Dec 2015 8:07 p.m. PST |
I have read about vines being grown on trees (referred to as the Italian way of doing it) on the battlefield of Marengo, so it was a method used for a long time. Druzhina Illustrations of Costume & Soldiers |
Swampster | 14 Dec 2015 10:33 a.m. PST |
" where and when is the picture from?" 15th century Milanese. Fits well with Marengo in region. The system of growing through trees is called 'alberate'. I've seen somewhere that it is still used in Portugal. link and link have list of systems ancient and modern for those really keen on vines :) I have done some research on medieval Italian agriculture but focussed on the 13th century when I was reading about Montaperti. I meant to link to these before… This pic, showing poles and low vines, is by a Flemish artist though it may well show somewhere French – 16th century
And one from Germany – probably 16th century. This has a trellis
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Peithetairos | 14 Dec 2015 6:56 p.m. PST |
I actually wrote a short blog post about this, as I want to depict a Punic war Era Vineyard. Here is the link to the text featuring some ancient authors: link I had the idea ot model the vine growing on elm trees, similar to the depiction below. I'll use MiniNatur plane tree foliage for the vines and textured wire for the trees. Grapes I might make using poppy seeds:
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Early morning writer | 14 Dec 2015 7:49 p.m. PST |
Very cool information. Original post, while looking very nice, look just looks like the ones I see locally just without the wires and I wondered if that was correct. (There are hundreds of thousands of acres of vineyards in my region – and I don't partake! They do give us our own 'fall foliage' display, though.) |
Baranovich | 14 Dec 2015 9:20 p.m. PST |
I absolutely love these kinds of topics that delve so deeply into the details of a specific type of historical scenery. Great information everyone! |
Midlander65 | 15 Dec 2015 4:26 a.m. PST |
Thanks very much Swampster and Peithetairos: great information – I wished I had posted the question up on here before making these. I had actually tried to find information on early vine cultivation but was clearly looking in the wrong places. In the absence of anything definitive, I based mine on some small vineyards I saw near Minerve, in the South of France where vines were grown as unsupported bushes in rows and pruned into a slightly linear form to catch the maximum sunlight. That method seems to have been used form very early times and obviously that would have been possible in the 16th C. I could have exaggerated the bushiness and made the rows a bit less regular but, as Early morning writer says, it isn't very different in appearance to the usual wire-trained style. Given the objective of looking different, in 15mm scale, on a war-games table, the low vines on poles would just look like modern wire-trained vines modelled in 10 mm scale and the vines grown directly in trees would just look like trees (at least with my modelling abilities – I don't fancy making bunches of grapes with each grape 0.2mm/0.008" long. Swampster's first picture of the tree – twin rope supported vines would be really distinctive and I'll have a go at modelling that. |
BigRedBat | 15 Dec 2015 8:39 a.m. PST |
I love that top picture of Swampsters with the trees and stakes- very interesting. Would be fun to model… |
Swampster | 15 Dec 2015 9:23 a.m. PST |
I think the rows of unsupported vines look fine too. The Sienese fresco of good government shows pretty neat rows (though too far away to see if they are supported) and that is 14th century. |