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 :. | Last Supper | Madonna of the Rocks | The Last Supper-l | Madonna Benois Madonna with a Flower | Portrait of a Musician |
Related Artists:
Mariotto Di Cristofano
San Giovanni Valdarno, 1393 - Firenze, 1457
Alfred Elmore
Irish-born British Painter, 1815-1881 was a Victorian history and genre painter. He was born in Cork, Ireland, the son of Dr. John Richard Elmore, a surgeon who retired from the British Army to Clonakilty. His family moved to London, where Elmore studied at the Royal Academy of Arts. His early works were in the troubadour style of Richard Parkes Bonington, but he soon graduated to religious work, notably The Martyrdom of Thomas Becket, commissioned by Daniel O'Connell for Westland Row Church in Dublin. Between 1840 and 1844 Elmore travelled across Europe, visiting Munich, Venice, Bologna, and Florence. Elmore seems to have been associated with The Clique, a group of young artists who saw themselves as followers of Hogarth and David Wilkie. According to his friend William Powell Frith he was member of the group, but since it was most active while he was in continental Europe, his involvement was probably short-lived. Most of Elmore's later works were historical narrative paintings. Religious Controversy and The Novice were implicitly anti-Catholic in character. Other paintings set episodes from Shakespeare, or the history of the French Revolution. They often contained subtle explorations of the process of creation, most importantly his two paintings about technological innovation, The Invention of the Stocking Loom (1847, Nottingham Castle Museum) and The Invention of the Combing Machine (1862, Cartwright Hall, Bradford). Both portray the process of industrialisation by depicting picturesque pre-industrial handicrafts. The inventor is supposed to be pondering these manual skills while he forms in his mind a mechanism to replace them. Elmore's best-known work is On the Brink (1865; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), a moral genre painting depicting a young woman who has lost her money gambling, and is 'on the brink' of responding to the blandishments of a seducer, who is depicted as a satan-like figure,
Wybrand Hendriks
(June 24, 1744, Amsterdam - January 28, 1831, Haarlem), was a Dutch painter and the concierge of the Teylers Museum. According to the RKD he learned to paint while working for the decorative wall paper factory of J. Remmers in Amsterdam. From 1786 to 1819 he was the second concierge ("kastelein") of the Teyler's Stichting in Haarlem, where he lived at the "Fundatiehuis" as curator of the art collection, with his studio in the old drawing room of Teyler's drawing academy, which had itself been moved to the city hall. He assumed the position in 1785 after his predecessor Vincent Jansz van der Vinne had left in disagreement with Martin van Marum, the head of the fossil and instrument collections. As curator, he managed to purchase an important collection of Italian drawings from the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden in 1790. He is known for portraits, landscapes, and flower still lifes in the manner of Jan van Huysum.