Italian High Renaissance Painter and Inventor, 1452-1519 Italian High Renaissance Painter and Inventor, 1452-1519 Florentine Renaissance man, genius, artist in all media, architect, military engineer. Possibly the most brilliantly creative man in European history, he advertised himself, first of all, as a military engineer. In a famous letter dated about 1481 to Ludovico Sforza, of which a copy survives in the Codice Atlantico in Milan, Leonardo asks for employment in that capacity. He had plans for bridges, very light and strong, and plans for destroying those of the enemy. He knew how to cut off water to besieged fortifications, and how to construct bridges, mantlets, scaling ladders, and other instruments. He designed cannon, very convenient and easy of transport, designed to fire small stones, almost in the manner of hail??grape- or case-shot (see ammunition, artillery). He offered cannon of very beautiful and useful shapes, quite different from those in common use and, where it is not possible to employ cannon ?? catapults, mangonels and trabocchi and other engines of wonderful efficacy not in general use. And he said he made armoured cars, safe and unassailable, which will enter the serried ranks of the enemy with their artillery ?? and behind them the infantry will be able to follow quite unharmed, and without any opposition. He also offered to design ships which can resist the fire of all the heaviest cannon, and powder and smoke. The large number of surviving drawings and notes on military art show that Leonardo claims were not without foundation, although most date from after the Sforza letter. Most of the drawings, including giant crossbows (see bows), appear to be improvements on existing machines rather than new inventions. One exception is the drawing of a tank dating from 1485-8 now in the British Museum??a flattened cone, propelled from inside by crankshafts, firing guns. Another design in the British Museum, for a machine with scythes revolving in the horizontal plane, dismembering bodies as it goes, is gruesomely fanciful. Most of the other drawings are in the Codice Atlantico in Milan but some are in the Royal Libraries at Windsor and Turin, in Venice, or the Louvre and the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Two ingenious machines for continuously firing arrows, machine-gun style, powered by a treadmill are shown in the Codice Atlantico. A number of other sketches of bridges, water pumps, and canals could be for military or civil purposes: dual use technology. Leonardo lived at a time when the first artillery fortifications were appearing and the Codice Atlantico contains sketches of ingenious fortifications combining bastions, round towers, and truncated cones. Models constructed from the drawings and photographed in Calvi works reveal forts which would have looked strikingly modern in the 19th century, and might even feature in science fiction films today. On 18 August 1502 Cesare Borgia appointed Leonardo as his Military Engineer General, although no known building by Leonardo exists. Leonardo was also fascinated by flight. Thirteen pages with drawings for man-powered aeroplanes survive and there is one design for a helicoidal helicopter. Leonardo later realized the inadequacy of the power a man could generate and turned his attention to aerofoils. Had his enormous abilities been concentrated on one thing, he might have invented the modern glider.   Related Paintings of LEONARDO da Vinci :. | The Madonna of the Carnation (detail) dg | Our Lady and St Anne | The Virgin and Child with St Anne | Mona Lisa (La Gioconda) sdg | Virgin of the Rocks,completed (mk08) |
Related Artists:
Arthur Pond
Arthur Pond (1705?-1758) was an English painter and engraver. Born about 1705, was educated in London, and stayed for a time in Rome studying art, in company with the sculptor Roubiliac. He became a successful portrait-painter. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1752, and died in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, 9 September 1758. His numerous original portraits include Alexander Pope, William, Duke of Cumberland, and Peg Woffington. Pond was also a prolific etcher, and used various mixed processes of engraving by means of which he imitated or reproduced the works of masters such as Rembrandt, Raphael, Salvator Rosa, Parmigiano, Caravaggio, and the Poussins. In 1734-5 he published a series of his plates under the title Imitations of the Italian Masters. He also collaborated with George Knapton in the publication of the Heads of Illustrious Persons, after Jacobus Houbraken and George Vertue, with lives by Thomas Birch (London, 1743-52); and engraved sixty-eight plates for a collection of ninety-five reproductions from drawings by famous masters, in which Knapton was again his colleague. Another of his productions was a series of twenty-five caricatures after Pier Leone Ghezzi, republished in 1823 and 1832 as Eccentric Characters.
Marianne Stokes
(1855 Graz, Styria - August 1927 London), born Marianne Preindlsberger in the Austrian province of Styria, was an Austrian painter. She settled in England after her marriage to Adrian Scott Stokes (1854-1935), the landscape painter, whom she had met in Pont-Aven. Marianne Stokes was considered one of the leading artists in Victorian England. Preindlsberger first studied in Munich under Lindenschmidt and having been awarded a scholarship for her first picture, 'Muttergluck', she worked in France under Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (1852-1929), Colin and Gustave Courtois (1853-1923). She painted in the countryside and Paris, and, as with many other young painters, fell under the spell of the rustic naturalist Jules Bastien-Lepage. Her style continued to show his influence even when her subject matter changed from rustic to medieval romantic and biblical. While in France she met the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck, in whose company she visited Pont-Aven in 1883. Her first salon painting, 'Reflection', which had been painted in Brittany, was exhibited in 1885 at the Royal Academy. Her work was also shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, New Gallery, and the Society of British Artists and in 1885, a year after her marriage, she took to using the name 'Mrs. Adrian Stokes'. She held a joint exhibition with her husband at the Fine Art Society in 1900. The Stokes' lived in St Ives where Marianne was a member of the Newlyn School. Having no children, they regularly travelled abroad, frequently to the Tyrol, and in 1905 to Slovakia and the High Tatra. Here they spent about half a year sketching and painting in the villages of Važec, Mengusovce and Ždiar. Adrian Stokes concentrated on landscapes with images of hay-harvesting and picturesque cottages, while Marianne Stokes painted portraits showing fine detail of the garments. These paintings provide a valuable record of the Slovak culture. After abandoning oils, and inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite movement, she painted flat compositions in tempera and gesso, her paintings giving the impression of being frescoes on plaster surfaces. She was an Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours.
Jan Rustem
(b. 1762 in Istanbul - d. 1835 near Dekštas, Lithuania) was a painter of Armenian, Turkish or Greek ethnicity who lived and worked in the territories of the Polish CLithuanian Commonwealth. Primarily a portrait painter, he was commissioned to execute portraits of notable personalities of his epoch. For many years he was a professor at the University of Vilna, the predecessor of Vilnius University. He was born in Instanbul, and a young boy was sponsored by Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski who invited him to the Commonwealth around 1774. Czartoryski paid for his studies in Warsaw, where among his tutors were Jean-Pierre Norblin de La Gourdaine and Marcello Bacciarelli. Between 1788 and 1790 he moved to Germany, where he became a freemason. Two years later he returned to the Polish?CLithuanian Commonwealth and lived for some time in Warsaw, later moving to Vilna. Following the partitions of the Commonwealth, Rustem started working for the Common School of Vilna, which was later remamed the Imperial University of Vilna, as assistant to Franciszek Smuglewicz. After Smuglewicz's death, Rustem took over some of his duties. In 1811 he became a professor of sketching and in 1819 became a professor of painting. Rustem retired in 1826, but continued to give lectures until his death.