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 :. | The Verkundigung | Drawing of an Infant | The Virgin and St Anne (mk08) | Mona Lisa (mk08) | The Anunciacion |
Related Artists:
PESNE, Antoine
French painter (1683-1757) French painter active in Prussia. He studied with his father, the portrait painter Thomas Pesne (1653-1727), and with his maternal great-uncle, Charles de La Fosse. In 1703, as a pupil at the Academie Royale, he would have won the Prix de Rome with his Moses and the Daughters of Jethro (untraced), had not Jules Hardouin Mansart, adviser to the Academie, deemed all entries that year unworthy. Nevertheless Pesne left for Italy, making the acquaintance of Jean Raoux in Venice and being allowed the use of a studio in Rome by Charles Porson, Director of the Academie de France. While in Venice, Pesne painted the portrait of Friedrich Ernst von Knyphausen
Merse, Pal Szinyei
Hungarian Painter, 1845-1920 was a Hungarian painter and politician. Born in Szinye??jfalu, Hungary (today Chminianska Nov?? Ves, Slovakia), he learned painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich under Karl von Piloty. He was a friend of Wilhelm Leibl and Hans Makart. His are some of the earliest works of Impressionism in Hungary and Central Europe. At the 1873 World's Fair in Vienna he won a medal with his painting Bath House. Szinyei was also an active politician. He was elected to the parliament of Hungary where he fought for the modernization of art education. He died in February 2, 1920, just four month and two days before the Trianon treaty, in Jarovnice
William Hodges
English Painter, 1744-1797 English painter. He first attended classes at William Shipley's Academy in the Strand, London, and from 1758 to 1765 was apprenticed to Richard Wilson (about whom he published a short biographical essay in 1790). Hodges followed Wilson's classical landscape style periodically throughout his career.