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Equestrian sculpture

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

Contents

[edit] History

Image:Marek Aureliusz Kapitol.jpg

[edit] 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.

There were numerous bronze equestrian portraits (particularly of the emperors) in ancient Rome, but they did not survive because it was standard practice to melt down bronze statues for reuse of the precious alloy as coin or other, smaller projects (such as new sculptures for Christian churches). The sole surviving Roman equestrian bronze, of Marcus Aurelius (illustration, right), owes its preservation on the Campidoglio, Rome, to the popular mis-identification of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, with Constantine the Great, the Christian emperor.

[edit] Renaissance

After the Romans, no equestrian bronze was cast in Europe until Donatello achieved the heroic bronze equestrian statue of the condottiere Gattamelata, in Padua, executed in 1445–1450.

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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 ([1]). 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.

[edit] Equestrian sculptures

[edit] Argentina

[edit] Armenia

Archduke Charles of Austria, Heldenplatz, Vienna

[edit] Austria

[edit] Belgium

[edit] Bulgaria

[edit] Chile

[edit] Croatia

[edit] Czech Republic

[edit] Denmark

[edit] Finland

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[edit] France

[edit] Georgia

[edit] Germany

Bamberg

Berlin

Braunschweig

Bremen

Cologne

Hanover

Koblenz

  • The equestrian sculptural monument of Kaiser Wilhelm I, Deutsches Eck, by Emil Hundrieser, is the tallest of the Kaiser Wilhelm equestrian monuments, the sculpture itself is 14 meters high.

Lübeck

Magdeburg

  • The first equestrian sculpture north of the alps is the Magdeburger Reiter ("Magdeburg equestrian"), ca. 1240 in Magdeburg, probably showing Kaiser Otto I.

Merseburg

Weimar

The Bamberg Horseman
Frederick the Great by Rauch, Unter den Linden, Berlin
Magdeburger Reiter

[edit] Greece

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[edit] Hungary

[edit] Italy

Gattamelata (Padua)
Ferdinando de Medici (Florence)
Colleoni (Venice)

[edit] Kyrgyzstan

  • Equestrian statue of Mikhail Frunze at a large park across from the train station

[edit] Mexico

Charles IV, Mexico City

[edit] Poland

Prince Poniatowski, Warsaw

[edit] Russia

Moscow

St Petersburg

Toliatti

The monument figures prominently in several works of fiction, including Andrei Bely's modernist novel Petersburg
The Bronze Horseman in Saint Petersburg, probably the most famous equestrian from the 18th century.
Impressionist statue of Alexander III in the Marble Palace
Yury Dolgoruky in Moscow, a celebrated example of Socialist Realism equestrian sculpture
Monument to Vasily Tatischev in Toliatti.

[edit] Serbia

[edit] Spain

Statue of Philip IV in Madrid, by Tacca. The achievement of stability, owed to Galileo Galilei.
Monument to Francisco Pizarro at his natal town, Trujillo.
Statue of Philip III in Madrid, at the Plaza Mayor.
Monument to Cervantes: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the Plaza de España, Madrid.

[edit] Sweden

[edit] Turkey

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Samsun

[edit] Ukraine

Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Kiev

[edit] United Kingdom

Greek Olympian rider at British Museum
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Lobey Dosser monument to Bud Neill

[edit] United States

Baltimore, Maryland

Boston, Massachusetts

Charlottesville, Virginia

Robert E Lee
Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson

Chicago, Illinois

Sheridan by Borglum
Masaryk by Polasek
Indian by Meštrović
Grant by Rebisso

Colorado Springs, Colorado

Denver, Colorado

Buckaroo
On the Warpath

El Paso, Texas

37 Feet Tall

Hoboken, New Jersey

McPherson, Kansas

Madison, New Jersey

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Morristown, New Jersey

Newark, New Jersey

New York City

Theodore Roosevelt
Marti

Palmyra, Tennessee

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

George Washington
John Reynolds
George McClellan
Joan of Arc

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Richmond, Virginia

The following statues are located on Monument Avenue.

George Washington
Robert E. Lee
JEB Stuart
"Stonewall" Jackson

St. Louis, Missouri

Apotheosis of Saint Louis

San Diego, California

San Francisco, California

Washington D.C.

  • Bronze equestrian of South American liberator Simón Bolívar, by Felix George Weichs de Weldon. On 18th St. at C St. and Virginia Ave. NW. At 27 feet tall it is possibly tallest equestrian statue in U.S., 1959.
  • Gold-plated equestrian of General George Clinton on Connecticut Avenue

[edit] Uzbekistan

[edit] Ukraine

[edit] Song

"Equestrian Statue" is the title of a 1967 song by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, in which a town square is enlivened by the presence of a rather lively equestrian statue of a former dignitary.

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