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 :. | Profile of an old man | Drawing of an Infant | Anatomical studies of the basin of the Steibeins and the lower Gliedmaben of a woman and study of the rotation of the arms | Mona Lisa | Leda fh |
Related Artists:
HEUSCH, Jacob de
Dutch painter (b. 1657, Utrecht, d. 1701, Amsterdam).
Antonio Maria Esquivel
Nacio en Sevilla en 1806. Comenzo los estudios de pintura en la Academia de Bellas Artes de Sevilla. Alli se familiarizo con la tecnica pictorica y el detallismo al estilo de Murillo. En 1831, se traslado a Madrid, donde concurso en la Academia de San Fernando, siendo nombrado academico de merito. En contacto con el ambiente intectual madrileno de esos anos, participo activamente en la fundacion del Liceo Artistico y Literario en 1837, donde daria clases de Anatomia, asignatura que impartiria tambien mas tarde en la Academia de San Fernando. En 1839, otra vez en Sevilla, sufrio una enfermedad que le dejo practicamente ciego; el artista, sumido en una profunda depresion, se intento suicidar arrojandose al rio Guadalquivir. Enterados sus companeros y amigos poetas y artistas y movilizados por el Liceo para ayudarle, sufragaron entre todos un caro tratamiento realizado por un prestigioso oftalmologo frances. Gracias a esto, en 1840 sano y recupero la vision. El artista, agradecido, pinto a sus amigos, poetas y pintores del Romanticismo, en un cuadro que se ha hecho justamente celebre. Como reconocimientos oficiales, recibo la placa del Sitio de Cadiz y la Cruz de Comendador de la Orden de Isabel la Catolica. En 1843 es nombrado Pintor de Camara y en 1847 academico de San Fernando, siendo ademas miembro fundador de la Sociedad Protectora de Bellas Artes. Como teorico de la pintura, redacto un Tratado de Anatomia Pictorica, cuyo original se guarda en el Museo del Prado. Fallecio en Madrid en 1857. Sus hijos Carlos Maria (1830-1867) y Vicente tambien fueron pintores.
LANFRANCO, Giovanni
Italian painter (b. 1582, Parma, d. 1647, Roma). Italian painter and draughtsman. A major figure in the development of the Roman Baroque in the 1620s, he painted many altarpieces and some cabinet pictures, but was notable above all for a number of dome frescoes that are indebted to the works of Correggio; most celebrated is the Assumption of the Virgin (1625-7) in the dome of S Andrea della Valle, Rome. He also influenced the development of art in Naples, where, between 1634 and 1646, he executed a series of vast fresco commissions that look forward to the art of Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena. A vast number of Lanfranco's preparatory drawings survive, the majority of which are now in the Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples. Broadly speaking they are of two types: small (up to 200*250 mm) compositional sketches, either in brown pen, with or without brown wash, on white or beige fine paper, or in red chalk, sometimes with red wash, or, more rarely, in black chalk or a combination of both red and black; and slightly larger