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 :. | Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani | The adoration of the Konige | The Annunciation | The Annunciation | Woman portrait |
Related Artists:
Gerard ter Borch the Younger
painted Mother Combing the Hair of Her Child. in 1652
Gerard Seghers
(Antwerp, 1591-18 March 1651), also Zegers, was a Flemish Baroque painter and one of the leading Caravaggisti in the Southern Netherlands. He was the son of an innkeeper but not related to the jesuit and painter Daniel Seghers. He was possibly a student of either Abraham Janssens or Hendrick van Balen, and he showed great talent, because in 1608 aged only 17 he is listed as a master in the Guild of St. Luke. It was during his trip to Italy around 1613 that he came under the influence of Caravaggio's followers. Bartolomeo Manfredi, in particular, was influential. Many other Dutch and Flemish painters were working in the style there, such as Gerard Honthorst, which is strongly characterized half-length figures illuminated by strong lighting and dramatic chiaroscuro. One work from this period is his Judith with the Head of Holofernes in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome. Caravaggism, both in history and monumental genre paintings, continued to mark Seghers's works when he returned to Antwerp around 1620. The Patient Job, National Gallery, Prague.He married on his return to Antwerp (ca.1621) with Catharina Wouters (d.1656), with whom he had eleven children. His son Jan-Baptist Seghers (1624-1670) also became a painter. After 1630, his palette lightens up considerably and the influence of Peter Paul Rubens is noticeable in paintings like the Adoration of the Magi (1630) in the Church of Our Lady, Bruges.
Jessie Willcox Smith
American Golden Age Illustrator, 1863-1935 was an American illustrator famous for her work in magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and for her illustrations for children's books. Born in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Smith studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia, graduating in 1888. A year later, she started working in the production department of the Ladies Home Journal, for five years. She left to take classes under Howard Pyle, first at Drexel and then at the Brandywine School. Jessie Willcox Smith, Illustration for The Water-Babies (1916)She was a prolific contributor to books and magazines during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, illustrating stories and articles for clients such as Century, Collier's Weekly, Leslie's Weekly, Harper's, McClure's, Scribners, and the Ladies' Home Journal. Smith may be most well known for her covers on Good Housekeeping, which she painted from December 1917 through March 1933. She also painted posters and portraits. Her twelve illustrations for Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1916) are also well known. On Smith's death, she bequeathed the original works to the Library of Congress' "Cabinet of American Illustration" collection. Smith was close friends with the artists Elizabeth Shippen Green and Violet Oakley,