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 :. | John the Baptist | Studies for a Nativity | The Annunciation | Virgin of the Rocks (mk10) | Detail of Madonna of the Rocks |
Related Artists:
Dmitry Levitzky
1735-1822) was a Russian-Ukrainian portrait painter. Dmitry was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in a family of clergyman and engraver Grigory Levitzky. His father was his first art teacher. Later be became a pupil of Aleksey Antropov who came to Kiev to paint the Cathedral of St. Andrew. In 1770, Levitzky became famous as a portrait painter after the exhibition of six of his portraits in the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. For the portrait of Alexander Kokorinov, Director and First Rector of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg (1769) he was elected an academician and appointed the Professor of the portrait painting class at the Academy of Arts.
heinrich hansen
Heinrich Hansen (13 October 1861 ?C 17 April 1940) was a German Lutheran theologian and the father of the Lutheran High Church movement in Germany. Hansen was born in Klockries near Lindholm (Nordfriesland) as a son of a teacher. In Kiel and Erlangen he studied theology, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and in particular the Old Testament under August Klostermann. He worked since 1887 as a pastor in Schleswig-Holstein: in Reinfeld, Lindholm, on the island Pellworm, in Kropp and in Olderup near Husum. Hansen wrote Latin hymns and worked on a Low German Bible translation and published a Low German hymnal. By the study of the old Lutheran theologians, particularly Martin Chemnitz, and the Roman Catholic theologian Johann Adam Möhler, he came to an Evangelical Catholic view about church. In the Reformation jubilee year of 1917??exactly 100 years after Claus Harms?? Hansen published 95 theses (Stimuli et Clavi) in Latin and German, as a sharp criticism against contemporary Protestantism. His theses influenced the foundation of "Hochkirchliche Vereinigung" in October 1918. Hansen is well-known as a co-founder and the first chairman of Hochkirchliche Vereinigung. He died in Breklum
karl isakson
Karl Isakson, född 1878, död 1922, konstnär. Karl Isakson växte upp i Stockholm, han och systern Ester uppfostrades av en religiös ensamstående mor, då fadern tidigt gått bort.