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 :. | You branching of the Blutgefabe, anatomical figure with heart kidneys and Blutgefaben | The Anunciacion | Salai as John the Baptist | Rule fur the proportion of the human figure | Small devotional picture by Verrocchio |
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Giuseppe Bottani
Italian , Cremona 1717- Mantova 1784 was an Italian painter active in the Baroque period. He was born in Cremona. In Florence, he was a pupil of Vincenzo Meucci and il Puglieschi. He moved to Rome to work under Agostino Masucci, then he returned to Cremona after 1745. In 1769, he was named professor of painting and director of the Accademia di Belli Arti in Mantua. He was known for painting landscapes in the style of Gaspard Poussin, and figures in the style of Maratta. He painted a St. Paola taking leave of her Attendants as being in the church of SS. Cosmo e Damiano at Milan.
Domenico Fetti
Italian painter , Rome 1589 - Venice 1623 was an Italian Baroque painter active mainly in Rome, Mantua and Venice. Born in Rome to a little-known painter, Pietro Fetti, Domenico is said to have apprenticed initially under Ludovico Cigoli, or his pupil Andrea Commodi in Rome from circa 1604-1613. He then worked in Mantua from 1613 to 1622, patronized by the Cardinal, later Duke Ferdinando I Gonzaga. In the Ducal Palace, he painted the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. The series of representations of New Testament parables he carried out for his patron's studiolo gave rise to a popular specialty, and he and his studio often repeated his compositions. In August or September 1622, his feuds with some prominent Mantuans led him to move to Venice, which for the first few decades of the seventeenth century had persisted in sponsoring Mannerist styles (epitomized by Palma the Younger and the successors of Tintoretto and Veronese). Into this mix, in the 1620s?C30s, three "foreigners"??Fetti and his younger contemporaries Bernardo Strozzi and Jan Lys??breathed the first influences of Roman Baroque style. They adapted some of the rich coloration of Venice but adapted it to Caravaggio-influenced realism and monumentality. In Venice where he remained despite pleas from the Duke to return to Mantua, Fetti changed his style: his formalised painting style became more painterly and colourful.
Ulrich Hubner
(17 June 1872 Berlin - 29 April 1932 Neubabelsberg) was a German painter. He was born into a family of artists, his academic training he received in 1892 in Karlsruhe with Robert Poetzelberger, Gustav Schönleber, and Carlos Grethe. He then studied at the private art school in Munich Friedrich Fehr. In 1899, he was a member of the Berlin Secession, and in 1906 and 1907 was on the board. In 1899, he won the prize for advertising designs for cooperative advertising by Ludwig and Otto Stollwerck Henkell. He painted in Berlin, Havel, and in the summers in Hamburg, Lebeck, Rostock and Travemende (where he had his principal residence from 1909 to 1912), and in particular, many harbor scenes. He showed at Kunstverein in Hamburg in 1910. Some of his works are in the Behnhaus Museum, in Lebeck, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.