Greco Ottomon Polacre San Nicolo

[Jeffrey Modell]

I am drawing San Nicolo from the Antoine Roux painting. A similar but not exactly the same ship is Bella Aurora, which is pretty much a flat-on side view painting. The San Nicolo painting is on an angle, so I used GIMP and the perspective view to get a flat on side view (not perfect). My question is the side profile of San Nicolo on this Greek ship, specifically the side above the maximum width of the ship. It looks to me like Bella Aurora is cut profile A., but I cannot decide about San Nicolo.

The Panagos drawing has a different number of gunports and bow from the Antoine Roux original. Possibly a mix of Bella Aurora and San Nikolaus. It's really dramatic, though!

Opinions, insight & facts all welcome & thanks in advance!

 

[Jeffrey Modell]

Going with B.

 

[Thanasis]

You might want to consider also this painting...

File:Joseph Cartwright - A Grecian Polacker - B1984.21.2 - Yale Center for British Art.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

commons.wikimedia.org

 

[Jeffrey Modell]

We see two contrasting designs with San Nicolo and Bella Aurora. San Nicolo, painted in 1809, shows a convex bow of the pre-Clipper ship variety, which can also be seen in the modern polacre Pelican of Londan. Bella Aurora has a much sharper, convex bow that passes on from the bark and brig commonality and begins to close on the packet and clipper ships circa 1850. The book of Roux's paintings describes San Nicolo as a 400 ton merchant polacca, which is what you can see in this painting (twice the earlier average of about 200 tons for a polacca). Panagiotis Mastrantonis shows a drawing of Roux's San Nicolo painting but with the Bella Aurora bow, calling her the polacca of Agios Nikolas, and describing her as a flagship during the 1821 war. As my friend says, paintings were the photographs of the time so I am inclined to believe the bow of San Nicolo was of the more convex, earlier variety. I am still tweaking her to reconcile the slimmer convex prow with the full deck above and am not satisfied with the angle on the sid-walls above deck in my 3d model. It seems like plenty numerically but doesn't look steep enough.

Note that there is some shaped hull on the knee of the head, though mostly hidden. This is not a mistake by the painter or yours truly; it is seen on a number of Greco-Ottomon polacca &/or xebec paintings, and you can also see it in the tiny hawk-beak prows of a few clipper ships. Mastrantonis removes it from his drawing and uses a conventional stem. The rudder does not appear in the Roux painting of San Nicolo, which would make it impossibly small unless the hull is extraordinarily deep. I therefore placed it based on the Bella Aurora painting.

From the man standing tall at the front of the ship, I presume there is a short raised forecastle with no rails (as is the case with Pelican of London).

This project is going far slower than I had hoped, moving forward in spurts as ideas come to me. One of the upcoming issues will be whether and to what extend the fore and main masts are single poles, have just a stepped topgallant or are stepped both at the topmast and topgallant like conventional square ship. I have seen the whole gamut on various chambequins and polaccas. ​

Comments and suggestions welcome!​

 

[Jeffrey Modell]

I tweaked the hull a bit. Some per smoothing lines, and some to make the bow slightly sharper.

 

[Jeffrey Modell]

I have further tweaked the hull. It is interesting that the Agios Nikolaos painting appears (after much inspection) to have no lids on the gun ports, whereas Bella Aurora painting clearly does. I originally thought the red by the ports represented lids but now think it is just the view across the gun deck to the inside bulkheads on the other side. Finally, I have been going back and forth on whether the hull extends to the beak or whether instead there is a filling piece between the cheeks. I can lash the bowsprit gammoning either way (just bring the stem up a bit as may be the case in the painting). Either way looks to be easier to put the head rail assemblies on after that.