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 :. | St John the Baptist t | Virgin of the Rocks | Funf studies of grotesque faces | Portrat of Isabella d-Este | Battle of Anghiari |
Related Artists:
Jan Antonisz. van Ravesteyn
(1572(?) - buried June 21, 1657) was a successful painter to the Dutch court in The Hague. Van Ravensteyn was born in The Hague. It is unknown who taught him how to paint, but he was a follower of the Delft portrait painter Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt. Van Ravesteyn is mentioned there in the city archives 1597. From 1598 until his death he lived in the Hague, where in 1598 he became a member of the Guild of St. Luke of the Hague. In 1604 he married Anna Arentsz van Berendrecht and in the same year he was mentioned as a good painter by Karel van Mander (though his earliest dated works are from 1611). In 1608 he bought a house on the Molstraat and in 1628 he moved in the Molstraat. In 1640 his wife was buried and in the same year his daughter Marie married one of his pupils, the painter Adriaen Hanneman. In 1654 he moved to the Nobelstraat next to the house of his daughter. In 1656 he left the guild with a group of dissatified painter friends and was one of the founders of the Confrerie Pictura. He was a Catholic and his name occurs often as a witness in the records of the church in the Molstraat, such as for the marriage of his daughter Agnes in 1641 with Willem van Culemborgh. His portrait was painted by Sir Anthony van Dyck and he produced Schutterstuk works. His workshop produced many portraits for the royal house of Nassau and he competed with Miereveld for several commissions. Van Ravesteyn was in turn, the teacher of Dirck Abrahamsz., Leendert Barthouts, Johannes Harmensz. Borsman, Aelbert Dircksz. Coeppier, Pieter Craen, Jacob Dirksz. van den Enden, Fransise de Goltz, Adriaen Hanneman, Barent Jansz., Thomas Ouwater, Clement Ram, Jan Rassenbourch, Frederick Sonnius, Dirck Verlaer, Jan Pous Voet and Pauwels Willemsz.
Giambattista Pittoni
(1687?C1767) was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque or Rococo period, active mainly in his native Venice. Pittoni is best known for his "grand-manner" canvases depicting religious, historical, and mythological subjects (such as Sophonisba and Polyxena). He was a co-founder of the official painter's academy in Venice (in competition to the old fraglia or painter's guild), the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, and he succeeded as President (1758?C1761) his contemporary Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Pittoni never left his native Venice, but completed commissions from German, Polish, Russian, and Austrian patrons. His mature palette was noted, as was Tiepolo's, for his lightness of tone. Besides Tiepolo, Pittoni's influences were Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Sebastiano Ricci, and Antonio Balestra. His paintings were of a Rococo style, but later became more sedate in their approach towards Neoclassicism.
FERRETTI, Giovanni Domenico
Italian painter, Florentine school (1692-1747)