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 master of the Pala Sforzesca attributed | Landscape in the Arnotal | Study fur the Sforza-Reiterstandbild | Portrat of Isabella d-Este | Madonna in the cave |
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Robert Reid
1862-1929 Robert Reid Galleries Robert Lewis Reid (July 29, 1862 ?C December 2, 1929) was an American Impressionist painter and muralist. Reid was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston under Otto Grundmann, where he was also later an instructor. In 1884 he moved to New York City, studying at the Art Students League, and in 1885 he went to Paris to study at the Acad??mie Julian. Upon returning to New York in 1889, he worked as a portraitist and later became an instructor at the Art Students League and Cooper Union. Much of his work centered on the depiction of young women set among flowers. His work tended to be very decorative. In 1897, Reid was a member of the Ten American Painters, who seceded from the Society of American Artists. Around the turn of the century, Reid worked on several mural projects and when he returned to paintings, around 1905, his work was more naturalistic, even though his palette trended toward soft pastels. He died in Clifton Springs, New York.
Raja Ravi Varma
1848-1906, Indian painter. He was the most important and one of the earliest Indian artists of the 19th century to work in oil paints. The subjects of his paintings were often mythological, but they were produced in a European historicist style. He absorbed the influence of such French 19th-century academic painters as William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Boulanger and of Indian contemporary popular theatre, specializing in the type of mythological paintings that found favour with Indian rajas and British administrators. His successful exploitation (from 1894) of the lithographic reproduction of his paintings ensured, for the first time in India, that the work of an individual artist could reach a mass market.
Jules Lefebvre
Tournan-en-Brie, 1834-Paris 1912. French Academic Painter.