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 Portinari Altarpiece | The annunciation | Lady with the ermine | Mona Lisa (mk45) | Annunciation sgt66 |
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oscar bjorck
född 15 januari 1860 i Stockholm, död av en hjärtattack i sitt hem klockan 03.00 den 5 december 1929, var en svensk konstnär och professor vid Konsthögskolan 1898-1925, och från 1918 även vice preses. Åren 1877-1882 var han elev till Edvard Pers??us vid konstakademins principskola och målade bland annat prisämnena Loke fängslas af asarne (1880), Gustaf Vasa inför kung Hans (1881) och Den förlorade sonens återkomst (1882, belönad med kungliga medaljen). 1883 fick Björck akademiskt resestipendium och vistades vintern 1883?C84 i Paris. Vintern 1884?C85 reste Björck till M??nchen, målade några porträtt, bland annat ett i helfigur av sin hustru. Våren 1885 flyttade han till Venezia och på hösten till Rom. Där målade han den stora modelltavlan Susanna (Göteborgs museum) och Romerska smeder (galleriet i Washington, en skiss till samma tavla finns i Göteborgs museum). 1887 målades i Venezia Veneziansk saluhall (nationalmuseum), Lördagsmässa i Markuskyrkan och andra tavlor. Efter en sommarvistelse på Skagen, där han förut tillbringat två somrar, 1882 och 1884, bosatte sig Björck 1888 i Stockholm. Han har sedan huvudsakligast målat porträtt. Bland dessa kan nämnas flera av konung Oscar (bland dem ett på Skokloster, ett i helfigur på Drottningholm, ett med krona och mantel, på Stockholms slott, ett som övergick i tyske kejsarens ägo), prins Eugen vid staffliet (nationalmuseum, 1895), kronprins Gustaf (Stockholms slott, 1900), konstnärens hustru (helfigur, 1891, Göteborgs museum) och friherre Nordenfalk (konstakademien, 1892). Dessutom skapade han några landskap, ett par genrebilder och olika dekorativa målningar. Från 1889 var han ledamot vid konstakademin och lärare vid Konsthögskolan. 1898 blev han professor. Björck var kommissarie för konstavdelningen vid Stockholmsutställningen 1897 och vid Baltiska utställningen 1914 samt för den svenska utställningen i London 1924.
Anton Graff
1736-1813 Swiss painter, active in Germany. He was a pupil of Johann Ulrich Schellenburg (1709-95) in Winterthur and continued his training with Johann Jakob Haid in Augsburg between 1756 and 1765. He worked for the court painter Leonhard Schneider (1716-62) in Ansbach from 1757 to 1759, producing large numbers of copies of a portrait of Frederick the Great (probably by Antoine Pesne). This was an important step in furthering his career, as were the months he spent in Regensburg (1764-5) painting miniatures of clerics and town councillors. He was court painter to the Elector Frederick-Christian of Saxe-Weimar in Dresden from 1766 and taught at the Hochschule der Bildende K?nste there. In 1771 he travelled to Berlin, where he painted portraits of Jakob Mendelssohn, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and J. G. Sulzer. Sulzer introduced him at court, which resulted in many commissions. He was invited several times to teach at the Akademie der K?nste in Berlin, but he remained in Dresden. He often travelled to Leipzig, and in summer he frequently went to Teplitz (now Teplice, Czech Republic) and Karlsbad
SODOMA, Il
Italian High Renaissance Painter, 1477-1549 Sienese painter, whose real name was Giovanni Antonio Bazzi. Born in Vercelli, Piedmont, he went to Rome c.1508. Commissioned by Pope Julius II, he painted frescoes in the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican. Raphael's frescoes afterward replaced most of his work there. For Agostino Chigi in the Farnesina Villa, Sodoma painted two frescoes, The Marriage of Alexander and Alexander in the Tent of Darius. In Siena and its vicinity he produced many works, executed in a saccharine style.