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 :. | Annunciation (detail) sg77 | Funf studies of grotesque faces | The Virgin and Child with St Anne | St Jerome sgyu | Leda |
Related Artists:
John Rogers
American Sculptor, 1829-1904, He was an American sculptor who produced very popular, relatively inexpensive figurines in the latter 19th century. He became famous for his small genre sculptures, popularly termed "Rogers Groups", which were mass produced in cast plaster. A total of 80,000 copies of almost 80 Rogers Groups were sold across the United States and abroad. At the height of their popularity, Rogers' figurines graced the parlors of homes in the United States and were found as far away as Chile and Australia. The English novelist Charles Reade furnished his home with all the Rogers figurines available to him, and in the Dakota Territory, Lt. Col. George Custer and his wife had one.
Palmer, Samuel
English, 1805-1881 English painter, draughtsman and etcher. Palmer was a key figure of English Romantic painting who represented, at least in his early work, its pastoral, intuitive and nostalgic aspects at their most intense. He is widely described as a visionary and linked with his friend and mentor William Blake, though he stood at an almost opposite extreme in his commitment to landscape and his innocent approach to its imagery.
Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann
(born November 21, 1819 - died July 11, 1881 in Copenhagen) was a Polish-born Danish painter. She was married to the sculptor Jens Adolf Jerichau. Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann was born in Zoliborz (Jolibord) a borough of Warsaw.Her father Philip Adolph Baumann (1776 - 1863), a mapmaker, and her mother, Johanne Frederikke Reyer (1790 - 1854), were German. At the age of nineteen, she began her studies in Desseldorf which at the time was one of the most important art centres in Europe and her early subject matter was drawn from Slovak life. She began exhibiting there and in 1844 attracted public attention for the first time. After she moved to Rome, her paintings were primarily of local life. It was here that she met her future husband, Jens Adolf Jerichau, whom she married in 1846. When the artist couple was not travelling, she spent many hours a day in their studio in Rome. She was particularly fond of the Italian carnival as a theme.