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 :. | Jacopo Bellini | You branching of the Blutgefabe, anatomical figure with heart kidneys and Blutgefaben | Knieened figure in Draperie | Study fur the Sforza-Reiterstandbild | The Madonna of the Carnation g |
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Eglon van der Neer
(1635/36, - May 3, 1703), was a Dutch painter of historical scenes, portraits and elegant, fashionable people, and later of landscapes. Van der Neer was born in Amsterdam and was probably first taught by his father, Aert van der Neer, who married in Amsterdam in 1629, coming from Gorinchem. Eglon had a least five brothers and sisters, who were baptized in the Nieuwe Kerk between 1640 and 1650. He took lessons from Jacob van Loo, who was then one of the foremost figure painters in Amsterdam. Around 1654 Van der Neer, who probably had just finished his education with Van Loo, traveled to Orange, Vaucluse in the South of France and entered the service of Friedrich von Dohna (1621-1688), Governor of the Principality of Orange. Van der Neer stayed for three or four years in Orange and returned to Amsterdam by the end of 1658. There he married in February Maria Wagensvelt, the daughter of a wealthy Rotterdam notary. In 1663 Van der Neer and his family moved to Rotterdam, where Adriaen van der Werff became his student. He stayed in Rotterdam until his wife died in 1677. In 1679 he moved to The Hague and in 1680 he became a member of the Confrerie Pictura there. Later that year he moved again, taking up his residence at Brussels, where he married the miniature painter Marie Du Chastel in the following year. She bore him nine children.
John Alonzo Williams
American , 1869-1951
Gottlieb Schick
romanticism artist. German, 1776-1812 German painter. He trained at the H?he Karlsschule in Stuttgart (1795-7) under the classically-orientated painter Philipp Friedrich von Hetsch (1758-1839), a pupil of David. Schick also took private lessons (1797-8) with the sculptor Johann Heinrich von Dannecker. From 1799 to 1802 Schick studied in Paris under David, and he soon became one of David's favourite students. He made two unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de Rome with compositions that derived from the style of David. However, greater independence is seen in his life-size painting Eve (1800; Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Mus.), a magnificent allegory of Beauty synthesizing a classically-orientated reinterpretation of ancient art and a proto-Romantic interpretation of biblical subject-matter, inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost. As Schick himself stated (letter to Dannecker, 10 July 1800), he had tried to emulate both the Medici Venus and the female figures of Raphael. In 1802, on a pension from Frederick II, Duke of Werttemburg, Schick moved to Rome and for almost a decade played a leading role in Roman artistic life. His friendship with Joseph Anton Koch led to mutual influence in the work of the two artists. Koch was indebted to Schick for invaluable hints on oil painting and for choice of subjects. For a fortnight in July 1805, Schick exhibited in the Pantheon his large oil painting The Sacrifice of Noah (2.50*3.27 m, 1804; Stuttgart, Staatsgal.). The work was inspired by Raphael's Old Testament frescoes in the Vatican Loggie; and it brought Schick enormous success. Despite financial hardship, Schick continued to work indefatigably, and without waiting for commissions, on a wide variety of projects. These included biblical and mythological subjects as well as portraits. Between 1806 and 1808 he completed his Apollo among the Shepherds (Stuttgart, Staatsgal.), a subject he had attempted while still in Paris and then again in Rome in 1805. The second Rome version had clearly gained through Schick's concentrated thought over a period of several years, and the result represented an avowal of faith both in the artist's own gifts and in German Classicism.