Lot 1: Horse and Rider, Leonardo da Vinci’s (Only Surviving Sculpture on Auction)

Invaluable Auctions ^ | October 30, 2019 | Invaluable

[nuconvert]

Rough staying in the saddle with no hands & no feet.

[skr]

True, lol!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Swordmaker.

I've been absent a lot of late, been feeling poorly, the dog ate my homework, etc. Here are the other GGG topics introduced since the previous Digest ping:

• Ancient Babylonian 'Omen' Has Helped Scientists Verify Timing of an Epic Solar Storm [2019]
• The Basket Age [2019]
• The Battle of Midway [2013]
• Did an extraterrestrial impact trigger the extinction of ice-age animals? [2019]
• Discovery of Prehistoric Baby Bottles Shows Infants Were Fed Cow's Milk 5,000 Years Ago [2019]
• How evolution builds genes from scratch [2019]
• Scientists find early humans moved through Mediterranean earlier than believed [2019]
• Wood Buried Under Ocean Floor Thousands of Miles at Sea [2019]

[Varda]

My “art review from limited perspectives” has kicked in. I don’t see a horse bucking.
This is a statue of a riding master teaching a horse the Capriole. It’s one of the military moves of the classical riding school, the Lipizzaner’s of Austria made famous in modern times.

Granted I only took dressage for a short time, but I swear that’s exactly what this looks like. The horse is correctly on the bit and not out of control.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Varda!

[SunkenCiv]

I haven’t watched it yet, must switch machines to do that, meanwhile:

Levade and Capriole
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMB0QTDbNjU

[Varda]

Thanks! I watched and it's good. Here's a picture of a trainer working on the Standing Capriole with the trainer on the ground.

[Cvengr]

The wax ones go for $10 ea down in Tijuana.

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.google.com/search?q=davinci+horse+grand+rapids+milan&tbm=isch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%2527s_horse

[Varda]

This is the one I know as Leonardo's horse. The details in it (and the wax sculpture) look much better than the sculpture at auction.

[SunkenCiv]

The statue of the horse, to be made in honor of the Sforza dynasty, was of course not made at the time, but Leonardo made a wax model, and had planned to bury it upside down, pouring the molten bronze into the hoofs, casting the whole thing using the lost-wax process. Like so many projects, he left it unfinished, but the bronze had to be used instead to make cannon during the unsuccessful defense of Milan against an attack by, hmm, I think the French, who used the model for target practice.

The two modern versions are based on the drawing, were made (if memory serves) in upstate NY. An 8 foot proof of concept used to stand on the west side of the walkway leading to the Grand Rapids horse, but that was later donated or sold to yet another location. The other full-sized version was sent to Milan. For a brief time, the two completed horses were displayed outside the building where they’d been made, that would have been nice to see.