Equestrian sculpture

An equestrian sculpture (from the Latin "equus" meaning horse) is a statue of a mounted rider.

History

Ancient Rome

Such statues frequently commemorated military leaders, and those statesmen who wished to symbolically emphasize the active leadership role undertaken since Roman times by the equestrian class, the equites or knights.

Bronze equestrian portraits (particularly of the emperors) were a popular artform, but they rarely survive because it was standard practice to melt down bronze statues for reuse as coin or new sculptures (eg in the late empire, following Rome's conversion to Christianity, to make new statues for the new Christian churches). Also, medieval Christians destroyed them, thinking they were pagan idols. The sole surviving Roman equestrian bronze, of Marcus Aurelius (illustration, right), owes its preservation on the Campidoglio, Rome, which was not melted down due to the popular mis-identification of it with the philosopher-emperor with Constantine the Great, the Christian emperor.

Renaissance

No equestrian bronze was cast in Europe until Donatello achieved the heroic bronze equestrian statue of the condottiere Gattamelata, in Padua.

Giambologna's equestrian bronze of Ferdinand de' Medici for the Piazza della SS. Annunziata was completed by his assistant, Pietro Tacca, in 1608. Tacca's last public commission was the colossal equestian bronze of Philip IV, begun in 1634 and shipped to Madrid in 1640. In Tacca's sculpture, atop a complicated fountain composition that forms the centerpiece of the façade of the Royal Palace, the horse rears, and the entire weight of the sculpture balances on the two rear legs—and, discreetly, its tail—a feat that had never been attempted in a figure on a heroic scale, one of which Leonardo had dreamed.

America

In the United States, the first two full-scale equestrian sculptures were Clark Mills Andrew Jackson (1852) and Henry Kirke Brown's George Washington (1856) for Union Square, New York. Mills was the first American sculptor to overcome the challenge of casting a rider on a rearing horse. The resulting sculpture was so popular he repeated it, for Washington, D.C., New Orleans and Nashville, Tennessee. Cyrus Edwin Dallin made a specialty of equestrian sculptures of American Indians: his Appeal to the Great Spirit stands before the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

20th century

After World War I few equestrian monuments were created in the age of the automobile. An exception is the muscular bronze Theodore Roosevelt by James Earle Fraser, centered on the Roosevelt Memorial at the American Museum of Natural History.

As the twentieth Century progressed the popularity of the equestrian monument declined. This was in part due to the decline of the Beaux-Arts style, the chosen one for many of these monuments, but is was also due to the almost complete cessation of the use of the horse as a work animal. From time immemorial leaders, both political and military ,rode horses as a matter of course and thus portraying them on horseback was a logical step. The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a revival in equestrian monuments, largely in the Southwest part of the United States. There, art centers such as in Loveland, Colorado, Shadoni Foundry in New Mexico and various studios in Texas began once again producing equestrian sculpture. These revival works fall into two general categories, the memorialization of a particular individual or the portrayal of more mundane subjects, notably the American cowboy. Such monuments are liberally scattered across a wide area of the Southwest.

Trivia

The urban legend that the number of legs connected to the ground on some equestrian statues is correlated to the manner in which the rider died, is only circumstantially true (^*). Authentic iconography is less simplistic.The 19th-century conventions of public sculpture in Germany, reserved equestrian sculpture to monuments of ruling monarchs. German generals and field marshalls as well as politicians usually stand. Scientists and artists are usually shown as a sitting sculpture.