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 :. | Saint jean-Baptiste | Lorenzo de Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio | The Annunciation | The embryo in the Uterus | The Annunciation |
Related Artists:
Jean Decourt
Jean de Court, an enamel painter of Limoges, succeeded François Clouet as painter to the king in 1572, and was in turn succeeded by his son, Charles de Court, in 1584 or 1589. Jean de Court painted in 1574 a portrait of Henry III, then Duke of Anjou.
Carl Philipp Fohr
German, 1795-1818,German painter and draughtsman. His first drawing lessons, from the age of 13, were from Friedrich Rottmann (1768-1816), the father of the painter Carl Rottmann. In 1810 the Darmstadt Court Councillor, Georg Wilhelm Issel, discovered Fohr sketching at Stift Neuberg near Heidelberg and, the following year, invited him to Darmstadt and provided encouragement and financial support. From 1813 Fohr carried out commissions for Grand Duchess Wilhelmina of Hesse, for whom he produced a Sketchbook of the Neckar Region, a collection of views and historical subjects (30 watercolours; 1813-14) and also a Baden Sketchbook (30 watercolours, 1814-15; both Darmstadt, Hess. Landesmus.). These far surpassed the usual level attained in this genre in their sharpness of detail, delicacy of colour and pictorial inventiveness. The Crown Princess granted him an annual pension of 500 guilders. From July 1815 to May 1816, Fohr was a student of landscape painting at the Kunstakademie in Munich.
Willem Cornelisz Duyster
Willem Cornelisz Duyster (1599 ?C 1635) was a Dutch painter from Amsterdam. Duyster paintings generally depicted genre scenes and portraits, quite often of soldiers. He exhibited a strong ability to paint textiles, accurately characterize his subjects, and to depict relationships between his figures. Duyster career was cut short when he succumbed to the plague in 1635.