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 Fotus in the Uterus | Female head (La Scapigliata) wt | Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist (mk08) | St John in the Wilderness | The annunciation |
Related Artists:
PATENIER, Joachim
Flemish painter (b. ca. 1480, Bouvignes, d. 1524, Antwerpen).
John Hamilton Mortimer
ARA (1740-1779) was a British Neoclassical figure and landscape painter and printmaker, known for romantic paintings set in Italy, works depicting conversations, and works drawn in the 1770s portraying war scenes, similar to those of Salvator Rosa. Mortimer became President of the Society of Artists in 1774, five years before his death, at age 39. John Hamilton Mortimer was born on 17 September 1740 at Eastbourne. Not much is known about his family, other than that his father was a customs officer, a dealer in flour and owner of several mills. By 1757, while he was still young, he was studying in London at the Duke of Richmond's Academy. During this time he became a friend of Joseph Wright, a fellow student at the Academy - a friendship which would endure throughout Mortimer's life. Mortimer is also known to have had some professional relationship with the artist Samuel Ireland, who was involved with etching Mortimer's work. At the St Martin's Lane Academy his fellow students included Thomas Jones and William Pars. In 1759 Mortimer won a first prize for a study after Michelangelo's Bacchus and a second prize for a life drawing. He began to display his works on a regular basis from the early 1760s onwards. He became an active member of the Society of Artists and President of the Society in 1774.
Arellano, Juan de
Spanish Baroque Era Painter, 1614-1676 Spanish painter. He was the pre-eminent painter of flower-pieces in 17th-century Spain. Although Spaniards of the previous generation had painted such works, it was the inspiration of Flemish and Italian examples in Madrid that from c. 1650 encouraged Arellano's success as a specialist in this genre. According to Palomino, who moved to the Court shortly after the artist's death and befriended many painters who had known him, Arellano began to paint flowers only in his thirties after a beginning that showed little promise.