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 :. | Madonna with the Yarnwinder | Portrats of two men | Anatomical drawing of the stomach and the intestine | Reverse side of the portrait of Ginevra de' Benci | Virgin of the Rocks |
Related Artists:
John Mix Stanley
A famous painter of Indians and Indian scen . American , 1814-1872 American , 1814-1872,was an American painter of landscapes, portraits and Native American life. He was born in Canandaigua, New York and orphaned at the age of 12. At age 14, Stanley became an apprentice to a coach maker. Looking for better work, he moved to west in 1832 and became a painter of signs and portraits. In spring 1843 Stanley accompanied the party of Indian agent Pierce M. Butler to the Tehuacana Creek Council. At the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1845, John Mix Stanley joined Colonel Stephen Watts Kearney's expedition to California and produced many sketches and paintings of the campaign. He traveled to Hawaii in 1848 and spent a year painting portraits of members of the royal family. He traveled across the Isthmus of Panama in 1853. He also painted Comanche warriors in their natural environment. He moved to Detroit in 1864 and remained there for the rest of his life. Stanley helped to found a forerunner of the Detroit Institute of Arts and to incorporate the National Gallery and School of Arts. Stanley's primary interests and sympathies were with the Indians. The Smithsonian exhibited his pictures, but Congress never appropriated monies for them. More than 200 of his works were destroyed in the Smithsonian fire of 1865.
Jan Olis
painted Frohliche Gesellschaft in 1644
Pine, Robert Edge
American, 1720-88 English painter, active also in America. His father, John Pine (1691-1756), was a well-known engraver and printseller of whom William Hogarth painted a portrait (c. 1755; Fredericton, NB, Beaverbrook A.G.). Robert Edge Pine was initially considered to have the potential to rival Joshua Reynolds as a portrait painter, a promise derived from such works as the full-length portrait of George II (1759; Audley End, Essex), painted without a sitting being granted him by the King. In 1760 he won a premium at the Society of Arts, London, for a history painting, the Surrender of Calais to Edward III, also known as the Burghers of Calais (untraced), which was engraved in 1762 by Fran?ois Germain Aliamet (1734-88), and another in 1763 for Canute the Great Reproving his Courtiers for their Impious Flattery (untraced), also engraved by Aliamet. Pine was not invited to become a founder-member of the Royal Academy in 1768, probably because of his radical politics; that year he painted a portrait of the political agitator John Wilkes (London, Westminster Hall). In 1772 he left the Society of Arts following a quarrel over its choice of directors; he moved to Bath, where he joined his brother, Simon Pine (d Aug 1772), a painter of miniatures. Their sister was married to the landscape painter Alexander Cozens. While at Bath Pine painted his most ambitious family group,