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 :. | Leda (detail) ghk | Rule fur the proportion of the human figure | Interior view of the Schadels | Madchenkopf with confused hair | Mona Lisa (mk08) |
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William Notman
(8 March 1826 - 25 November 1891) was a Canadian photographer and businessman. Notman was born in Paisley, Scotland in 1826, the same year in which photography was born in France. William Notman moved to Montreal in 1856. An amateur photographer, he quickly established a flourishing professional photography studio on Bleury Street. His first important commission was the documentation of the construction of the Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence River. The Bridge opened with great fanfare in 1860, attended by the Prince of Wales and Notman's camera. The gift to the Prince of a Maple Box containing Notman's photographs of the construction of the bridge and scenes of Canada East and Canada West so pleased Queen Victoria that, according to family tradition, she named him "Photographer to the Queen." Notman's reputation and business grew over the next three decades, the first Canadian photographer with an international reputation, and he operated his business as a partnership with other noted Canadian artists, initially John Arthur Fraser and then Henry Sandham, whom he also mentored. He established branches throughout Canada and the United States, including seasonal branches at Yale and Harvard universities, to cater to the student trade. Notman was also an active member of the Montreal artistic community, opening his studio for exhibitions by local painters; the studio also provided training for aspiring photographers and painters. Notman was highly regarded by his colleagues for his innovative photography, and held patents for some of the techniques he developed to recreate winter within the studio walls. He won medals at exhibitions in Montreal, London, Paris, and Australia. Photography during the mid 19th century was not the simple process it later became. The typical tourist generally did not carry a camera and much of the Notman studio's images were taken with the tourist's needs in mind. Visitors would look through Notman's Picture Books and chose views, to buy individually mounted or perhaps made up into an album, and have a portrait taken as well. Street scenes in the burgeoning cities of Canada, the magnificence of modern transportation by rail and steam, expansive landscapes and the natural wonders, all were in demand either as 8" x 10" prints, or in the popular stereographic form, and were duly recorded by the many staff photographers working for the Notman studio. William Notman was a regular contributor to the photographic journal Philadelphia Photographer and in partnership with its editor, Edward Wilson, formed the Centennial Photographic Company for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, held in honour of the 100th anniversary of the United States of America in 1876. He won the only gold medal to be awarded by the British judges and the portrait identification card required for entrance to the grounds was the ancestor of today's various photo-ID cards. When William Notman died in November 1891, quite suddenly after a short bout of pneumonia, management of the studio Wm Notman & Son was left to his son William McFarlane Notman, an experienced photographer in his own right, who with his brothers, had accompanied the itinerant settlement known as "End of Track" for the Canadian Pacific Railway and documented the construction of the railway towards the west. In 1935 William McFarlane Notman's younger brother Charles sold the studio to the Associated Screen News, and in 1957 the Notman Collection was purchased by McGill University, Montreal. The 200,000 negatives, 43 Index Books, 200 Picture Books and assorted memorabilia were transferred to the McCord Museum of Canadian History. With the addition of the McCord Museum's existing photographic holdings to the Notman Collection, the Notman Photographic Archives was born, with the Notman Collection serving as the kernel for an extensive Canadian photography department, covering Canada from Newfoundland to Victoria, the Great Lakes to the Arctic, from 1841 to 1935.
Lucien Pissarro
French Camden Town Group Painter, 1863-1944 was a French painter, printmaker and wood engraver. Eldest son of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, he was born in Paris and studied with his father. His works employ techniques of Impressionism and its successor, Neo-impressionism, but he also exhibited with Les XX. From 1890 he lived in London, becoming a British citizen in 1916. While in England he was one of the founders of the Camden Town Group of artists. In 1919, he formed the Monarro Group with J.B. Manson as the London Secretary and Theo van Rysselberghe as the Paris secretary, aiming to show artists inspired by Impressionist painters, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro.
Makovsky, Konstantin
Russian, 1839-1915 He produced historical and social scenes, as well as being a portrait painter of some renown, although his significance lies more in the role he played as a founder-member of the WANDERERS art society in late 19th-century Russia. He studied first at the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture (1851-8), which had been co-founded by his father Yegor Ivanovich Makovsky (1800-86), under Mikhail Ivanovich Skotti (1814-61) and Sergey Konstantinovich Zaryanko, then from 1858 to 1863 at the Petersburg Academy of Arts. In 1862 he was awarded a Minor Gold Medal, but the following year, together with 13 other students, Makovsky rebelled against the theme set for the Grand Gold Medal competition and left the Academy with the title of Artist of the Second Degree. In 1863 he joined the Petersburg Artel of artists, the forerunner of the Wanderers and the most potent symbol of the break with classical tradition. The reversal of official policy that this engendered led to his being made an academician in 1867, in 1869 a professor and in 1898 a full member of the Academy. As a member of the Wanderers, Makovsky was most notable for his new subject-matter, namely the common people. However, he split with the society in 1883 and by 1891 had become a member of the newly formed and more Salon-orientated St Petersburg Society of Artists, of which he was subsequently to be president. Makovsky often veered towards sentimentalism, giving his works a cloying pathos, as in his portrait of the Stasov Children (early 1870s) and Children Fleeing the Storm (1872),