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 :. | Self Portrait | Portrait of Ginevra de Benci | Madonna with the Yarnwinder | Study fur the communion | Study of an old man |
Related Artists:
Jozsef Rippl-Ronai
Hungarian Painter, 1861-1927 After his studies at the highschool in Kaposvar he went to study to Budapest, where he got a degree in pharmacy. In 1884 he travels to Munich to study painting at the Academy. 2 years later he gets a grant and that makes him able to move to Paris and study by Munkacsy. In 1888 he meets with the members of Les Nabis and under their influence he paints his first important work The Inn at Pont-Aven, a very deep paining with dark atmosphere. His first big success was the paining My Grandmother (1894). Later he travels back to Hungary, first the critics does not accept him very warmly, but finally he celebrates a success with the exhibition Rippl-Ronai Impressions 1890-1900. He believes that for an artist there is important not only his work, but also how he lives and what he wears. That is why he becomes also a designer (Andrassy dining room and the window-pane in the Ernst Museum). His exhibitions in Frankfurt, Munich and Vienna have got a great success in 1911-1913. He paints his last big work in 1919 (portrait of his friend Zorka) and in 1927 dies in his villa Roma in Kaposvar.
Johannes Adam Oertel
German, 1823-1909
Carlos de Haes
Spanish 1826-1898 Carlos de Haes Galleries Spanish painter of Belgian birth. In 1835 he moved with his parents to M?laga, where he studied under the court portrait painter and miniature painter Luis de la Cruz y R?os (1776-1853). In 1850 he returned to Belgium and studied with the landscape painter Joseph Quineaux (1822-95). During his studies there and on his travels in France, Germany and Holland, he became acquainted with contemporary Realist trends. He returned to Spain in 1855, becoming a naturalized Spaniard, and the following year he exhibited numerous landscapes at the Exposici?n Nacional, Madrid, to much acclaim. In 1857 he won the competition for the fourth chair of landscape painting at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Madrid with View of the Royal Palace from the Casa de Campo (1857; Madrid, Real Acad. S Fernando), a work showing characteristics of the Barbizon and Fontainebleau landscape schools. In 1860 he was elected Acad?mico de m?rito at the Real Academia de S Fernando in Madrid. By 1861 he was officiating and drawing up the regulations for the landscape competitions for aspiring pensionnaires. Consequently plein-air works came to be required in place of the previous tradition of submitting historical landscapes executed in the studio, a practice that discouraged the study of nature. De Haes suggested that only final corrections should be made in the studio, an attitude that indicates his timid initiation and acceptance of Realist trends.