VRANCIC, Faust (Verantius, Faustus), (1551?, Sibenik - January 20(27), 1617, Venice). He gained his first education in humanities in Pozsnoy (Bratislava) and in 1568 started to study philosophy and law in Padua, where he stayed until the middle of 1572. He may have spent the following years in Italy, though there is scarce information on this period of his life. In 1575 he was admitted into the Croatian brotherhood of St Jerome in Rome. In 1579 he was appointed administrator of bishop's estates in Veszprem where he stayed until 1581 when he accepted the post of secretary to king Rudolph II in Prague, where he studied sciences, mathematics and technical sciences. In 1594 he left the post and until 1598 lived in Dalmatia and Italy, in particular in Venice, where in 1595 he published his famous dictionary Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europae linguarum, Latinae, Italicae, Germanicae, Dalmaticae et Ungaricae (A Dictionary of the Five Noblest European Languages, Latin, Italian, German, Croatian and Hungarian). The dictionary, containing 5000 words of each language, is the first dictionary of the Croatian language and has a particular significance for mathematical and scientific terminology. Though Rudolph II appointed him titular bishop of Csanad, he performed the duties of royal adviser for Hungary and Transylvania. In 1605 he left the Court and entered the order of St. Paul in Rome. In 1606 he published the work Zivot nekoliko izabranih divic (Lives of Selected Virgins) in Croatian translation. Returning to Rome he became engaged in philosophy, in particular in logic. In 1608 in Venice he published Logica suis ipsius instrumentis formata and in 1610 in Rome Ethica christiana, under the pseudonym Justus Verax Sicenus. The revised edition of these two works titled Logica hova sius ipsius instrumentis formata et recognita Ethica christiana was published in 1616 in Venice under the author's real name. A return to Rome had a significant influence on his further research of technical problems. His major work Machinae novae Fausti Verantii Siceni cum declaratione Latina, Italica, Hispanica, Gallica et Germanica, published at the end of 1615 or at the beginning of 1616 in Venice, was gradually coming into being as a result of his research into the construction of machines and architectural problems. This work contains 49 sketches and projects in etching presenting 56 diverse machines and technical constructions, accompanied with commentaries and descriptions in Latin, Italian, Spanish, French and German. Though not all of these projects were new, many of them were originally invented by Vranèiæ and brought about a considerable enrichment of technical forms. In Rome he was engaged in a search for a solution to various practical hydrological problems, such as the problem of frequent outflows of the river Tiber and improvement of fountains in Venice. In order to be able to suggest steps to be taken in order to evade the outflows of the Tiber, Vrancic investigated the causes of them. His proposition of the solution to this problem is presented as the cartographic representation titled Vrbis Romae Dilvvivm (On Roman Water Flows) in the work Machinae novaeMachinae novae was published in Zagreb in 1993.

Part of the map Vrbis Romae Dilvvivm by Faust Vrancic