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 organs of the woman | The Annunciation | The master of the Pala Sforzesca attributed | Reverse side of the portrait of Ginevra de' Benci | Annunciation (detail) ey79 |
Related Artists:
Francis Towne
English Painter, 1739-1816 was an English water-colour painter. He was born in Isleworth, Middlesex, the son of a corn chandler. Apprenticed to a coach painter in London, he won a design prize from the Society of Arts, and studied for a while at St Martin??s Lane Academy. In 1763 he was employed by a coach painter called Thomas Watson, and went to Exeter on business. He had already begun painting in oils and also taught drawing, and now he began to accept commissions from wealthy families in Devon. After a tour of north Wales in 1777, undertaken with his friend, the lawyer John White, he began to specialize in water-colours. In 1780 he travelled to Rome and from there to Naples. On his return to Devon, he was asked by Sir Thomas and Lady Acland of Killerton to paint some views in Devon and North Wales, and in 1786 he went on a painting tour of the Lake District
Wilhelm von Kaulbach
German Painter, ca.1804-1874,Painter and illustrator. After initial instruction from his father, Kaulbach received his principal education, from 1822 to 1826, at the Kunstakademie, Desseldorf, under Peter Cornelius. Six months after Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, had summoned Cornelius to Munich, Kaulbach followed his tutor to the Bavarian capital, where he worked on various collaborative ventures with other pupils of Cornelius, and completed his practical training on such projects as the decoration of the Odeon (destr.) in 1826, and of the Hofgartenarkaden, from 1826 to 1829 (now painted over). More independent work followed with 16 frescoes on the theme of Cupid and Psyche for the Festsaal of the Herzog-Max-Palais (1829-35; now Munich, Neue Pin.),
Jules Elie Delaunay
Nantes 1828 - Paris 1891. French Neoclassical Painter. Studied under Hippolyte Flandrin. French Neoclassical Painter. Studied under Hippolyte Flandrin. French painter. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris on 7 April 1848, where he was a pupil of Joachim Sotta (1810-77), Hippolyte Flandrin and Louis Lamothe (1822-69). He became a disciple of Flandrin, and, though making his debut in the Salon in 1853 with the Saltworkers of Guerande (Nantes, Mus. B.-A.), he soon concentrated on history painting. In 1856 he won the Prix de Rome with the Return of the Young Tobias (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.) and left Paris to study at the Academie de France in Rome. His work is imbued with a deep religious sentiment cast in the restrained, controlled style and formal repertoire of Neo-classicism. From early in his career he produced many easel and wall paintings on religious subjects, such as Jesus Healing the Lepers (1850; Le Croisic,). In 1854 he received a commission to produce four fresco decorations for the church of the monastery of the Visitation-Ste-Marie in Nantes, which he completed the following year. In 1865 he returned to the monastery to decorate the chapel of St-Francois de Sales with scenes from that saint's life.