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 :. | Kvinnoportratt | The Annunciation | Portrait of Ginevra de' Benci sg | The Last Supper | Mona Lisa (mk45) |
Related Artists:
Octave Tassaert
Paris 1800-1874 was a French painter of portraits and genre, religious, historical and allegorical paintings, as well as a lithographer and engraver, though this family was of Flemish origin. He was the grandson of the sculptor Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert. Octave's first artistic training came from his father Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert (1765-c. 1835) and his older brother Paul (?-1855), before he was apprenticed to the engraver Alexis-François Girard (1787-1870). Next he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts (1817-25) from 1817 through 1825, under Guillaume Guillon-Lethi??re, but never won the school's Prix de Rome. Winning popular but not critical success, his works showing poor people's lives were felt melodramatic by critics but acclaimed by the public. His submission to the 1855 World Exhibition was well received by the critics, but Octave ceased to exhibit after the 1857 Salon, withdrawing more and more from the formal art world. Collectors of his works included Alfred Bruyas and Alexandre Dumas, fils, but in 1863 Octave stopped painting altogether and tried to become a poet (though none of his works are extant),
CLEVE, Joos van
Flemish Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1485-1540
Homer Watson
Canadian Painter, 1855-1936 Canadian painter. The son of a mill-owner, he was born in a region of rural southern Ontario, which he painted throughout his life. In 1874 he moved to Toronto to work at the Notman Photographic Studios; he also spent many hours copying paintings in the Toronto Normal School in order to improve his technique. In 1876 he visited New York, where he was impressed with the carefully composed paintings of the Hudson River school and the rural scenes of George Inness, who encouraged Watson to pursue his career. The following year he returned to Doon to work up his New York sketches into finished paintings. A work of this early period, Landscape with River (1878; Toronto, A.G. Ont.),