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 :. | Equestrian monument | The muscles of Thorax and shoulders in a lebnden person | The Baptism of Christ (detail) sg | Kvinnoportratt | Study fur the adoration of the Konige |
Related Artists:
Charles Landelle
1812-1908 French painter. His father, a calligrapher and musician from Mayenne, moved to Paris in 1825 to take up a post as musician in the Tuileries. Ary Scheffer, whom Landelle met through his father's contact with the Orleans court, encouraged him to become a painter. He registered at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts on 2 October 1837 as a pupil of Paul Delaroche and made his debut at the Salon in 1841 with a Self-portrait (Laval, Mus. Vieux-Cheteau). His first success, Fra Angelico asking God for Inspiration , indicated a sentimental, religious tendency in his work, which alternated with pretty pictures of young girls. Charity. commissioned by Antoine Vivenel (1799-1862), was followed by Idyll and Elegy (untraced), which were bought by the dealer Adolphe Goupil on the opening day of the 1844 Salon. The contract to buy also included Goupil's right of first refusal on the reproduction of all Landelle's future work. Subsequently, he painted the Three Marys at the Tomb in the pious manner of Ary Scheffer and a sweet, angelic St Cecilia, commissioned in 1845 by the Prefect of the Seine, in which elements of the early Renaissance art seen by Landelle on a trip to Italy in 1845 combined with the soft, pale style common among some of his colleagues from the studio of Delaroche. He also painted religious works for St Roch (1850), St Germain l'Auxerrois (1856) and St Sulpice (1875) churches in Paris.
Eugene Boudin
1824-1898 French landscape painter. Encouraged at an early age by Jean-Francois Millet, Boudin became a strong advocate of painting directly from nature. In 1874 he exhibited with the Impressionists, but, unlike those painters, he was not an innovator, and from 1863 to 1897 he exhibited regularly in the official Salon. His favourite subjects were beach scenes and seascapes, which show remarkable sensitivity to effects of atmosphere; on the backs of his paintings he recorded the weather, light, and time of day. His works link the careful naturalism of the mid 19th century and the brilliant colours and fluid brushwork of Impressionism.
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope
English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1829-1908,English painter. The second son of Yorkshire landed gentry, he was educated at Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1850 he studied in London with G. F. Watts, through whom he entered the artistic circle at Little Holland House, where he met D. G. Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. In 1857 Rossetti invited him to paint at the Oxford Union (Sir Gawaine and the Damsels at the Fountain), and in 1858 Stanhope occupied a studio next to Rossetti's at Chatham Place, Blackfriars (London), where he painted Thoughts of the Past (London, Tate); a modern-life subject indebted to Rossetti, it shows a prostitute recalling her former life. Stanhope's close friendship with Burne-Jones proved a more decisive influence on his work that, in the 1860s, consisted of dreamlike poetic and mythological subjects often set in quaint, enclosed spaces, as in I Have Trod the Winepress Alone