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 :. | Study fur a women head | Lady with the ermine | The Verkundigung | Our Lady and St Anne | Anatomical studies of the basin of the Steibeins and the lower Gliedmaben of a woman and study of the rotation of the arms |
Related Artists:
Joos van Craesbeeck
(c. 1605/06- c. 1660) was a Flemish painter who specialized in tavern interiors, tronies, and other works similar to his teacher Adriaen Brouwer. Born in Neerlinter (Flemish Brabant), he became a master in Antwerp's guild of St. Luke in 1633?C1634, and like his contemporaries David Teniers the Elder and David Rijckaert III he developed rustic genre scenes. He subsequently moved to Brussels, where he joined that city's painters' guild in 1651. Paintings such as Death is Violent and Fast are typical of his small, theatrical images of peasants brawling crowded with violent expressive figures. Unlike Teniers, whose style became more elegant, Craesbeeck continued to paint bawdy figures later in his career.
Jean Cotelle
Jean Cotelle Jean Cotelle, 'the younger', was a painter and engraver, born in Paris in 1645. He received his early instruction from his father, Jean Cotelle, and eventually visited Italy. On his return he devoted himself to his profession, producing historical paintings, miniatures, and occasionally etchings. His chef-d'oeuvre was the 'Marriage at Cana,' painted in 1681 for the cathedral of Notre-Dame. There are by him at Versailles several views in the gardens of that palace. He etched a plate representing 'Our Lord on the Mount of Olives,' and a series of seven scenes from the history of Venus. He was admitted into the Academy in 1672, and died at Villers-sur-Marne in 1708.
John Ruskin
English Romantic Writer and Painter, 1819-1900 English art critic. Born into a wealthy family, Ruskin was largely educated at home. He was a gifted painter, but the best of his talent went into his writing. His multivolume Modern Painters (1843 C 60), planned as a defense of painter J.M.W. Turner, expanded to become a general survey of art. In Turner he saw "truth to nature" in landscape painting, and he went on to find the same truthfulness in Gothic architecture. His other writings include The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851 C 53). He was also a defender of the Pre-Raphaelites. In 1869 he was elected Oxford's first Slade professor of fine art; he resigned in 1879 after James McNeill Whistler won a libel suit against him.