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 :. | Study fur the communion | Study fur the Sforza-Reiterstandbild | The Portinari Altarpiece | Virgin of the Rocks | Madonna with a Flower |
Related Artists:
christopher r.w.nevinson
christopher r.w.nevinson(1889 to 1946)English painter. Son of H. W. Nevinson, the war correspondent and author, he studied painting at St John's Wood, London, in 1908, although his formative years as a student were spent at the Slade School of Art (1909-12) in London. He was influenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as well as Sandro Botticelli, as seen from an early Self-portrait (1911; London, Tate). The Futurist Exhibition of March 1912, held at the Sackville Gallery, London, proved decisive for his development. He met Gino Severini and returned with him to Paris where he encountered Umberto Boccioni, Ardengo Soffici, Guillaume Apollinaire and Amedeo Modigliani. He continued his studies at the Acad?mie Julian and the Cercle Russe in Paris, announcing his affiliation with Futurism by exhibiting a painting called Rising City (1912; lost) in the Friday Club exhibition of January 1913. Its title was a homage to Boccioni's painting, City Rises (1910; New York, MOMA), which had been shown at the Futurist Exhibition.
Giovanni Migliara
Italian 1785-1837 He began his career as a scene painter with Gaspare Galiari (1761-1823) in Milan, working at the Teatro Carcano in 1804 and at La Scala from 1805 to 1809. Owing to illness, after 1810 he turned to small-scale works in watercolour or oil using various supports, including silk and ivory. At this date Milanese painting was dominated by Andrea Appiani and Luigi Sabatelli, both leading Neo-classical artists. However, Migliara remained aloof from this dominant movement and instead drew on medieval and historical subjects with Romantic undertones. His precise, jewel-like technique and choice of subject-matter found favour with aristocratic patrons in Milan. His figures are generally stilted and burdened by their costumes, though the crowd in Sacking of Minister Prina's House (1814; Milan, Gal. A. Mod.) is depicted with unusual fluency. In 1822 Migliara was appointed Professor of Perspective at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, and in 1833 he was nominated painter to the court of Charles-Albert, King of Sardinia (reg 1831-49). More typical of his historical scenes is Entrance to the Castle of Plessis de la Tour (Turin, Gal. Civ. A. Mod.), which was exhibited at the Brera in 1833. He also produced many topographically precise pictures of church interiors in which he combined his training as a scene painter with his knowledge of intaglio techniques.
Vladimir Baranov-Rossine
(1888?C1944) was a Russian-Ukrainian painter, avant-garde artist (Cubo-Futurist), and inventor of Jewish ethnicity Vladimir Baranov-Rossine was born in Kherson, Ukraine, to parents of Jewish ethnicity. In 1902 he studied at the School of the Society for the Furthering of the Arts in St. Petersburg. From 1903 to 1907 he attended the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. In 1908 he exhibited with the group Zveno ("The Link") in Kiev organized by the artist David Burliuk and his brother Wladimir Burliuk. In 1910 he moved to Paris, wher until 1914 he was a resident in the artist's colony La Ruche together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Nathan Altman and others. He exhibited regularly in Paris after 1911. He returned to Russia in 1914. In 1916 he had a solo exhibition in Oslo. In 1918 he had exhibits with the union of artists Mir Iskusstva ("World of Art") in Petrograd (St.Petersburg). In the same year he had an exhibition with the group Jewish Society for the Furthering of the Arts in Moscow, together with Nathan Altman, El Lissitzky and David Shterenberg. He participated at the First State Free Art Exhibition in Petrograd in 1919. In 1922 Baranov-Rossine was the teacher at the Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops (VKhUTEMAS) in Moscow. In 1924 he had the first presentation of his optophonic piano during a performance at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow - a synaesthetic instrument that was capable of creating sounds and coloured lights, patterns and textures simultaneously.