painted Stilleven met kan van steengoed in 1878 Related Paintings of Maria Vos :. | Stage Driver | egyptiskt handelsfrtyg,omkr. | The Ascension | Portrait of Margaret of Austria | A Man | Related Artists:
Henry George Hine,RI1811-1895
Simon Marmion (born c. 1425 at Amiens, France, died 24 or 25 December 1489, Valenciennes) was a French or Burgundian Early Netherlandish painter of panels and illuminated manuscripts. Marmion lived and worked in what is now France but for most of his lifetime was part of the Duchy of Burgundy in the Southern Netherlands.
Like many painters of his era, Marmion came from a family of artists, and both his father, Jean, and his brother Mille were painters. Marmion is recorded as working at Amiens between 1449 to 1454, and then at Valenciennes from 1458 until his death. He was patronized by Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy from 1454 when he was one of several artists called to Lille to work on the decorations for the Feast of the Pheasant. He was employed by several members of the ducal family, including Charles the Bold and Margaret of York. He was called "the prince of illuminators" by a near contemporary. Three years after his death his widow, Jeanne de Quaroube, married his pupil, the painter Jan Provoost, who on her death inherited the considerable Marmion estate.
Although best known for his illuminated manuscripts, Marmion also produced portraits and other paintings, altarpieces, and decorative work. A famous double-sided altarpiece with several Scenes from the life of St Bertin is in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (with two sections in the National Gallery (London). There is a Mass of Saint Gregory in Toronto, and a Lamentation of Christ in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,three works in Philadelphia, and several others elsewhere. Stylistically he lies between his French and Flemish contemporaries, with a Flemish innovation in composition and landscape. His perspective is usually technically sound, but the proportions of his figures are often awkward, and their poses rather stiff.
Leonardo Da VinciItalian 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.