Leonardo Da Vinci
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 and Child with a Pomegranate | The Battle of Anghiari | Reverse side of the portrait of Ginevra de' Benci | Adoration of the Magi | Adoration of the Magi | Related Artists: Jan Fyt1611-1661
Flemish Jan Fyt Gallery
Flemish painter, draughtsman and etcher.
He was apprenticed in Antwerp in 1621-2 to Hans van den Berch [Berghe] (not to be confused with Jan van den Bergh of Alkmaar) and probably completed his training with Frans Snyders. In 1629-30 Fyt became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke, but he continued to work for Snyders until 1631. In 1633 and 1634 he was in Paris. According to his biographers, he then went to Italy; an Italian journey is confirmed by the fact that in 1650 he joined the Antwerp Guild of Romanists (exclusive to those who had visited Rome), of which he became the dean in 1652. He apparently worked in Rome, where he joined the Schildersbent and was given the nickname Goudvink (Dut.: goldfinch). In Venice, according to Orlandi, Fyt worked for the Sagredo and Contarini families. He is also thought to have visited Naples, Florence and Genoa, and Orlandi stated that he also went to Spain and London. By 5 September 1641 Fyt was back in Antwerp, where, apart from a brief trip to the northern Netherlands in 1642, he apparently remained for the rest of his career. However, Jan-Erasmus Quellinus stated that he again travelled to Italy in the 1650s, a claim supported to some extent by the mention in 1671 of a Self-portrait (untraced) supposedly painted some 20 years earlier in Venice (see 1977 exh. cat.). Bartolomeo MontagnaOrzinuovi ca 1450-Vicenza 1523
.Painter and draughtsman. Montagna is first documented in 1459 in Vicenza as a minor and, still a minor, in 1467. In 1469 he is recorded as a resident of Venice. In 1474 he was living in Vicenza where, in 1476 and 1478, he was commissioned to paint altarpieces (now lost). He has variously been considered a pupil of Andrea Mantegna (Vasari), Giovanni Bellini, Antonello da Messina, Alvise Vivarini, Domenico Morone and Vittore Carpaccio. While none of these artists, except Carpaccio, was irrelevant to Montagna's stylistic formation, scholars agree that Giovanni Bellini was the primary influence on his art. He may have worked in Bellini's shop around 1470. Several of Montagna's paintings of the Virgin and Child in which the influence of Antonello da Messina is especially marked (e.g. two in Belluno, Mus. Civ.; London, N.G., see Davies, no. 802) are likely to be close in date to Antonello's sojourn in Venice (1475-6); they are therefore best considered Montagna's earliest extant works (Gilbert, 1967) rather than as an unexplained parenthesis around 1485 between two Bellinesque phases (Puppi, 1962). These early paintings appear to be followed by others in which the geometrically rounded forms derived from Antonello become more slender and sharper-edged. Their figures are imbued with a deeply felt, individual humanity, sometimes austere and minatory, sometimes tender. Among them are some larger-scale works, Hans HeysenSir Hans Heysen, OBE (8 October 1877 - 2 July 1968) was a well-known German Australian artist. He was particularly recognized for his watercolours of the Australian bush. He won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting a record nine times.
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