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 :. | Leda fh | Study fur the communion | The Annunciation | Grotesque profile of a man | The madonna with the Children |
Related Artists:
ulrica fredrica pasch
Ulrika Fredrika Pasch, född 10 juli 1735 i Stockholm, död 2 april 1796, var en svensk konstnär. Hon var dotter till konstnären Lorens Pasch d.ä. och Anna Helena Beckamn, syster till konstnären Lorens Pasch d.y. och brorsdotter till konstnären Johan Pasch. Ulrika Pasch började måla 1756 men hade tidigt tillsammans med sin bror fått undervisning av fadern. Hon blev hushållerska åt en släkting, men målade på fritiden. Under en tioårsperiod försörjde hon sin pappa och syster som professionell porträttmålare i Stockholm innan hennes bror återvände från sina studier utomlands 1766, då de började arbeta tillsammans. Deras samarbete beskrivs som harmoniskt och de valdes båda in i konstakademien 1773. Hon var inte den första kvinnan som valdes in i akademin, men hon var den första kvinnliga yrkeskonstnären som blev vald. Hon ska ha målat detaljerna på broderns tavlor, som klädesdetaljer och liknande. Ulrika hade en framgångsrik karriär och målade ofta porträtt av kungafamiljen och hovet. Hon ansökte dock upprepade gånger förgäves för en pension. Systern Helena Lovisa (1744-96) hushållade åt sina syskon. Trots att det sägs att hon själv var en ödmjuk person som aldrig framhävde sitt arbete, så är hon en av få kända självförsörjande kvinnliga yrkeskonstnärer i Skandinavien före artonhundratalet.
Francois Barraud
14 November 1899 - 11 September 1934) was a Swiss painter. Barraud was the eldest of four brothers who all painted or sculpted at various points in their lives. The brothers, François, Aime, Aurele and Charles, were largely self-taught artists having been raised as professional plasterers and house painters.Barraud attended evening classes at the local art school in 1911 together with his brothers.In 1919, he exhibited his paintings in La Chaux-de-Fonds and participated in the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Basel.Encouraged by the success of the exhibitions he left Switzerland in 1922, and moved to Reims in France where he worked as a house painter for two years. He married Marie, a French woman, in 1924. Marie subsequently featured as a model in several of his paintings. Around 1924 or 1925, Barraud found work in Paris as an artist and craftsman. While living in Paris he studied painting at the Louvre. François Barraud painted mainly still lifes, female nudes and portraits, including several double portraits of himself and his wife, Marie His precise, realist style of painting developed under the influence of the old Flemish and French masters he had studied at the Louvre. Barraud suffered periods of illness throughout his life and died of tuberculosis in Geneva, in 1934, at the age of 34. Arthur Stoll held a major collection of François Barraud's works. His works are also held in the Musee des beaux-arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the Coninx Museum in Zurich and the Foundation for Art, Culture and History in Winterthur.
baron grimm
German critic. He worked as a diplomat in Paris from 1749. Influenced by the Encyclopedists, he favoured the use of the Italian style in French operas (especially those of Rameau); in the Querelle des Bouffons of the 1750s he rejected all French music in favour of Rousseau, writing the satirical tract Le petit proph??te de Boehmischbroda (1753) and other works. He was a friend to the visiting Mozart family, 1763-4 and 1778.