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 :. | Muscle structure of the thigh | The Madonna of the Carnation (detail) dg | The Virgin of the rocks | Details of Mona Lisa | Studies fur the adoration of the Konige |
Related Artists:
Axel Lindman
painted Coastal Landscape, Normandie in 1877
Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret
(January 7, 1852 - July 3, 1929), was one of the leading French artists of the academic school. He was born in Paris, the son of a tailor, and was raised by his grandfather after his father emigrated to Brazil. Later he added his grandfatheres name, Bouveret, to his own. From 1869, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Leon Gerôme. In 1873, he opened his own studio with a fellow student Gustave-Claude-Etienne Courtois. From 1875, he exhibited at the Salon, where in 1880 he won the first-class medal for the painting An Accident, and a medal of honour in 1885 for Horses at the Watering Trough. From the 1880s, Dagnan-Bouveret along with Gustave Courtois, maintained a studio in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a fashionable suburb of Paris. By that time he was recognized as a leading modern artist known for his peasant scenes, but also for his mystical-religious compositions. His large-scale painting The Last Supper was exhibited at the Salon de Champ-de-Mars in 1896.[1] He also painted portraits for wealthy clients including the British collector George McCulloch. He was one of the first to use the then new medium of photography to bring greater realism to his paintings. In 1891, he was made an Officer of the Legion of Honour; in 1900 he became a member of the Institut de France.
constant troyon
French Barbizon School Painter, 1810-1865 Troyon's students included Evariste-Vital Luminais. French painter. He was brought up among the Sevres ceramics workers and received his first lessons in drawing and painting from Denis-Desire Riocreux (1791-1872), a porcelain painter who was one of the founders of the Musee National de Ceramique. Troyon began his career as a painter at the Sevres factory while also studying landscape painting in his spare time.