Written by Kate Jensen

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Horses are among the fastest land animals — at a gallop, they can reach over forty miles per hour. Since domesticating horses around six thousand years ago, humans have relied on them for battle, agriculture, travel, leisure, and other activities. 

Horses have helped shape the course of human history, and, along the way, have captured our imaginations. Horses appear everywhere from prehistoric cave paintings to early instant photography, showcasing the animals’ speed and power. 

Still, not all equestrian art conveys this speed and power. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Sforza Horse statue conveys just the opposite. Having taken over five hundred years and multiple artists to create, it might be the slowest moving horse in history. 

At the starting gate 

Building the Sforza Horse was not Leonardo’s plan when he first arrived in Milan in 1482. He came to the city on a diplomatic mission from Florence, bringing a silver lyre in the shape of a horse’s skull to the Milanese duke, Ludovico Sforza, as a token of peace for the two cities. 

Leonardo’s trip was not purely diplomatic. When he first arrived in the intellectual and military capital, he sent a CV-type letter to the duke, outlining both his artistic prowess and his hope to become a military engineer. 

Having no experience creating weapons (and providing only very complicated and unrealistic drawings as proof of his skill), Leonardo’s military career never came to fruition. Instead, Leonardo’s life in Milan was centered around his artistic pursuits. 

Finally achieving his goal of becoming involved in the Milanese court, Leonardo received a commission from Sforza in 1482. What exactly was being requested? The largest equine statue ever created and the largest bronze cast since antiquity, measuring over seven meters (twenty-three feet) high. 

Falling behind the pack 

Leonardo’s notebooks and letters do not preserve the date he began working on the Sforza Horse. They do however preserve much of the process though — including its many trials and tribulations to complete the statue. 

In some ways, the Sforza Horse project was doomed before it even started. Leonardo’s early designs were overly ambitious, depicting the giant horse rearing upward and balancing the weight of the statue between the horse’s back legs and other design elements. These designs would have been difficult to cast in bronze, even at a smaller scale. 

By 1489, Sforza himself seems to have lost hope in Leonardo’s abilities, sending a letter to Florence to request names of other, more qualified artists who might be able to take on the project. Luckily for Leonardo, the Florentines didn’t have any better suggestions, and Sforza begrudgingly allowed Leonardo to continue his work in April 1490.  

Three years later, Leonardo’s clay model for the horse was finished, and he had started making arrangements to cast the model in bronze. The nature of the horse’s construction would have made it very difficult to fire at the time — there simply weren’t ovens big enough to cast the largest horse in the world. 

Losing Hope 

Before Leonardo had a chance to test his solutions to this problem, war brewing between France and Italy put a damper on his plans. When French troops invaded Italy in 1494, the bronze set aside for casting the Sforza Horse was sent elsewhere for use in the war effort. 

In a letter to Sforza about this, Leonardo’s reaction was restrained. He said, “of the horse, I will say nothing, for I know the times.” Though he said nothing, he continued working on the mold for the horse. In absence of the necessary bronze, though, much of his attention turned to a new work commissioned in 1495 — The Last Supper. 

Matteo Bandello, an Italian writer who lived in Milan at the time, remembers seeing Leonardo hard at work on both the Sforza Horse and The Last Supper: “I have seen him hasten from the citadel, where he was modelling his colossal horse, […] by the shortest way to the convent, where he would add a touch or two and immediately return.” 

Despite his dedication, the Last Supper proved to be another difficult project for the artist. The painting is a fresco, a type of painting which involves adding pigment to wet plaster, and a type which Leonardo was infamously very bad at. Giorgio Vasari, in his biography of Leonardo, said that the painting had deteriorated to a “muddle of blots” by 1556. 

The Sforza Horse, too, did not have very long at all, in the end. Seeing this giant, pompous clay horse in the middle of the city, the French troops arriving in Milan made the very reasonable decision to use the statue as target practice in September 1499. 

A second wind 

For nearly five hundred years, the story of the Sforza Horse ended there. Leonardo never re-attempted the statue, and many of his sketches for the horse were lost over the centuries. Then came Charles Dent. 

Charles Dent, born in 1917, was an American man with two distinct interests — art and flight. Dent pursued these interests determinedly, trading artwork to pay for flight lessons, and collecting artwork throughout his career as an airline pilot with United Airlines. Retiring from United Airlines in 1977, Dent centered his determination around a new interest — the Sforza Horse.  

Already a lifelong fan of Leonardo Da Vinci, Dent’s intense interest in the Sforza Horse began when he came across a September 1977 National Geographic article entitled “The Horse That Never Was.” This article described the story of the Sforza Horse and, in doing so, gave Dent a mission that would carry him through the rest of his life. The mission? To finish what Leonardo started nearly five hundred years earlier.  

From the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, Dent worked with artists, historians, and donors to make the Sforza Horse a reality. Dent passed away from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) on Christmas day 1994, but his work on the Sforza Horse lived on. 

Reaching the finish line 

The Sforza Horse was unveiled in September 1999, precisely five hundred years since Leonardo’s clay horse was destroyed by the French. The installation ceremony drew visitors from around the world, and The New York Times reported that “many in the crowd dabbed at their eyes and snapped dozens upon dozens of photographs.” 

The reason for the intensity of emotion at the event is best summed up by Sam Saxton, one of the project’s early supporters. He said: “Over the years this project was probably carried on faith more than anything else. Just being here is an overwhelming event, the fact that it really is happening.” 

The long and winding tale of the Sforza Horse’s creation is a large part of what makes the sculpture unique, fostering a sense of disbelief that the statue was finished at all. In a world full of horse-themed art, the Sforza Horse’s stands apart as a testament to perseverance and community rather than speed and power. After all, if it hadn’t taken so long to build, wouldn’t it just be another big horse? And we already have plenty of those. 

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Bibliography

American Museum of Natural History. “Bred for Speed.” American Museum of Natural History, http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/horse/how-we-shaped-horses-how-horses-shaped-us/sport/bred-for-speed. Accessed 10 Nov. 2023. 

Bandello, Matteo. Novelle. Lucca, 1554, collab.its.virginia.edu/access/content/group/63d28990-3153-427f-b7b5-798f3c16286c/Assigned%20Readings/Bandello.pdf. 

Da Vinci Science Center. “Biography of Charles C. Dent.” Da Vinci Science Center, http://www.davincisciencecenter.org/mission-and-history/leonardo-and-the-horse/biography-of-charles-c-dent/. Accessed 11 Nov. 2023. 

—. “The Full Story of Leonardo’s Horse.” Da Vinci Science Center, http://www.davincisciencecenter.org/mission-and-history/leonardo-and-the-horse/the-full-story-of-leonardos-horse/. 

Fiorani, Francesca. The Shadow Drawing. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 17 Nov. 2020. 

Povoledo, Elisabetta. “ARTS ABROAD; Leonardo’s Huge Horse Comes to Life, 500 Years Later.” The New York Times, 14 Sept. 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/14/arts/arts-abroad-leonardo-s-huge-horse-comes-to-life-500-years-later.html. Accessed 11 Nov. 2023. 

Royal Collection Trust. “RCIN 912349 – Studies for Casting an Equestrian Monument (Recto); Further Casting Studies, and Lines of Poetry (Verso).” Www.rct.uk, http://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/exhibitions/leonardo-da-vinci/glynn-vivian-art-gallery-swansea/studies-for-casting-an-equestrian-monument-recto-further-casting-studies-and-lines-of-poetry-verso. 

Visit Scotland. “The Helix: Home of the Kelpies.” Visitscotland.com, 2019, http://www.visitscotland.com/info/see-do/the-helix-home-of-the-kelpies-p889261. 

Featured Image Credit: English:  Double Manuscript Page on the Sforza Monument, circa 1493, Biblioteca Nacional de España, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonardo_da_vinci,_Double_manuscript_page_on_the_Sforza_monument.jpg.