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 :. | Unfinished painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness | Woman portrait | The Fotus in the Uterus | Madonna with the Yarnwinder tw | Portrait de femme,dit a tort La belle ferronniere |
Related Artists:
Charles landseer,R.A.
1799-1879 Painter, brother of Thomas Landseer. He trained initially with his father John Landseer, then under Benjamin Robert Haydon, and in 1816 he attended the Royal Academy Schools in London. In 1823 he accompanied Sir Charles Stuart de Rothesay (1779-1845) aboard HMS Wellesley on a voyage to Portugal and then to Brazil, in order to negotiate a commercial treaty with Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil (reg 1822-31). Many of the drawings he made on this trip were exhibited in 1828 at the British Institution, and in that year he sent his first painting to the Royal Academy. This was Dorothea, illustrating a scene from Cervantes's Don Quixote. He continued to exhibit at the Academy until his death, showing mostly romanticized history paintings or such literary subjects as Clarissa Harlowe in the Sponging House from Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa (London, 1748). The English Civil War (1642-51) was of particular interest to him, his devotion to such historical subjects perhaps being attributable to the influence of his years with Haydon. He also painted portraits, genre scenes and animal studies . In 1837 he was elected ARA and in 1845 RA. In 1851, probably due to the influence of his brother Edwin, he succeeded George Jones as Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools. Responsible for instructing the antique class, his tenure was criticized both for the way his position had been obtained and for the deficiency of his teaching, and he retired from the Keepership in 1873 on full salary.
Josef Danhauser
Josef Danhauser (August 19, 1805, Laimgrube (now a part of Mariahilf or Neubau) - May 4, 1845) was an Austrian painter, one of the main artists of Biedermeier period, together with Ferdinand Georg Waldmeller, Peter Fendi, among others. His works, not very appreciated in his days, dealt with very moralising subjects and they had a clear influence of William Hogarth. Joseph Danhauser was born in Vienna in 1805, the eldest son of sculptor and furniture manufacturer Joseph Ulrich Danhauser and his wife Johanna (nee Lambert). He took his first painting lessons with his father and he later assisted the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He studied with Johann Peter Krafft and made his first exhibition 1826. Invited by Johann Ladislaus Pyrker, patriarch of Venice, he visited the city of Doges, where he started to study the Italian masters. He came back to Vienna via Trieste in 1827, visiting Prague. That very year he painted Ludwig van Beethoven's death mask, roughly 12 hours after his death and a water-colour representing his deathbed. In 1828, he spent some time in Eger, with an invitation of this Hungarian city archbishop Pyrker. He solicited him for some pictures for the gallery of the Archdiocese. After his father's death in 1829, his brothers and he managed his furniture factory during the Biedermeier movement, being the precursors of modern design. That made him put his painting career aside. In 1833, he responded to a second invitation from Eger's archbishop and he painted The martyr of Saint John for a new basilica in the city and he received the Vienna Academy prize for his picture Die Verstobung der Hagar and he specialised in Genre works. In 1838, he was appointed vice-rector of the Academy and married Josephine Streit, who was the daughter of a physician and with whom he had three children, Josef, Marie and Julie, born in 1839, 1841 and 1843 respectively. Josef Danhauser was appointed professor of historical Painting at the Academy in 1841, but he left this occupation and he travelled around Germany and the Netherlands with the textile maker, art aficionado and art sponsor Rudolf von Arthaber. In this journey, he was very interested in the Dutch School and the format of his works was littler. He died of typhus in Vienna in 1845. They named a street with his name in Vienna in 1862.
DERUET, Claude
French Baroque Era Painter, 1588-1660 was a famous French Baroque painter of the 17th century, from the city of Nancy. Deruet was an apprentice to Jacques Bellange, the official court painter to Charles III, Duke of Lorraine. He was in Rome between ca. 1612 and 1619, where - according to Andre Felibien - he studied with the painter and etcher Antonio Tempesta. During his stay in Rome, he painted the Japanese samurai Hasekura Tsunenaga on a visit to Europe in 1615. Deruet was made a noble by the Duke of Lorraine in 1621, and was then made a Knight of the Order of St Michel in 1645 by Louis XIII, who had in 1641 absorbed most of Lorraine into France. He had a luxurious residence in Nancy, named La Romaine, where Louis XIII and his Queen stayed in 1633. Claude Lorrain was an apprentice to Claude Deruet in 1623 for one year.