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 of an old man | Study Fur the Trivulzio-monument | Maria with Child and St. Anna | The madonna with the Children | The Baptism of Christ |
Related Artists:
Walter Richard Sickert
British Camden Town Group Painter, 1860-1942 British painter, printmaker, teacher and writer of German birth. Sickert was one of the most influential British artists of this century. He is often called a painter painter, appealing primarily to artists working in the figurative tradition; there are few British figurative painters of the 20th century whose development can be adequately discussed without reference to Sickert subject-matter or innovative techniques. He had a direct influence on the Camden Town Group and the Euston Road School, while his effect on Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin and Francis Bacon was less tangible. Sickert active career as an artist lasted for nearly 60 years. His output was vast. He may be judged equally as the last of the Victorian painters and as a major precursor of significant international developments in later 20th-century art, especially in his photo-based paintings.
Giovanni Battista Ortolano
Ferrara ca 1487-after 1524
Stanislaw Chlebowski
(1835-1884) was a Polish painter with Russian and Turkish connections. He was a renowned specialist in oriental themes. Chlebowski was born in Podole, and learned drawing in Odessa. Between 1853-1859, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, and then on a scholarship for six years in Paris as the pupil of the French orientalist painter Jean-Leon Gerôme. Chlebowski traveled to Spain, Italy, Germany, and Belgium. His first success was selling his painting "Joanne deArc in Amiens prisone to Napoleon III of France In the years 1864-1876 Chlebowski was master painter for Sultan Abdelaziz and took up residence in Constantinople. Chlebowski became popular with the Sultanate. During his services, he had obtained permission to bring with him a large Icon of Mother of God Leading our Way having been rescued from a Odegon Monastry in 1453. He had come across it in one of the magasins with old relics, unheeded by the Ottoman keeper. This account is certified in a letter by Comite National Polonais a Constantinople, dated June 27, 1938. In 1876 he moved to Paris. In 1881 he returned permanently to Krakow. The subject matter of his watercolors and oil paintings is diverse. He painted images of historical battles related to the history of Turkey, oriental genre scenes, landscapes, and portraits of Sultans. He died near Poznae in Kowanewko at age 49. Chlebowski lived abroad for a long time and as a result his paintings were very rare in Poland. The National Museum in Krakow houses some of his other important Orientalist works such as "Entree de Mahomet II e Stamboul".