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 Madonna of the Carnation g | Anatomical study of the brain and the scalp | La Vierge,l'Enfant Jesus et sainte Anne | Mona Lisa | Benois Madonna |
Related Artists:
Mose Bianchi
(Monza, 1840-1904) was an Italian painter. The family moved from Monza to Milan and Bianchi enrolled at the Brera Academy. Having interrupted his studies to serve in the second war of independence, he returned to attend the school of painting directed by Giuseppe Bertini. The award of a grant in 1867 enabled him to visit Venice and then Paris in 1869. He took part with some success at the Brera exhibitions and the Vienna Exhibition of 1873. It was in this period that he began to paint genre scenes in 18th-century settings and numerous portraits, soon becoming one of the artists most in demand with the Milanese middle classes. He returned to Venice in 1879 and visited Chioggia for the first time. Both places were to be featured also in later years in a series of intense views exhibited at exhibitions in Milan and Venice alongside genre scenes, views of Milan and landscapes of the countryside around Gignese.
Salomon Gessner
Swiss Painter, 1730-1788,a bookseller's son, was apprenticed to the bookseller Spener in Berlin. Giving up this employment, he lived for a time by painting and engraving, for which he had a considerable talent. In 1750 he settled in Zurich, continuing to live by painting, including painting on porcelain. He began to write idylls in poetic prose, beginning with Daphnis (1754). His Idyllen (1756) achieved a nation-wide success. In Der Tod Abels (1758) he attempted an epic in prose, which was followed by two plays (Schaferspiele), two stories, including Der erste Schiffer, and a few more idylls, Neue Idyllen (1772). In his idylls, Geßner, who is indebted to Theocritus and Virgil, creates an idealized, orderly, almost horticultural state of nature, from which everything rough and craggy has been eliminated; his shepherds are similarly untouched by the ruder aspects of country life. His work embodies the city-dweller's longing for a nature which he does not know, and this explains its instant popularity. W. Raabe uses Gebner's Idyllen, the publication of which coincided with the outbreak of the Seven Years War
John glover
English-born Australian Painter, 1767-1849 English painter. He was employed first as a schoolteacher at Appleby (Cumbria) and after 1794 as a drawing-master at Lichfield (Staffs), from where he sent drawings to London each year; on his occasional visits to the capital he received lessons from William Payne and was clearly influenced by him. In the 1790s he also began to practise in oils, some of which were exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1795 onwards. At the first exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours (April-June 1805) Glover's pictures were priced more highly than those of any other exhibitor; he was elected President of the Society in 1807 and again in 1814-15. A typical watercolour is his Landscape with Waterfall (U. Manchester, Whitworth A.G.).