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2. Naturalism
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2.7 Horses
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Egyption: circa 1350 BC
The domesticated horse
had arrived in the countries of the eastern Mediterranean at
some time in the second millennium, brought there from Asia during one of the
warlike migrations, and had been largely responsible for the overthrow of the
Egyptian Empire by the Hyksos in about 1500 bc. We may suppose that these
horses, 'the tanks of the ancient world', were more formidable than beautiful. But
quite early they were evolved from instruments of aggression into objects of pride.
On reliefs of the Ramassid period we can see that the Egyptians, having taken them
over from their conquerors, had cultivated their beauty as well as their strength, and
we can find the same feelings in the Assyrian reliefs from 1000 bc. A pride in the
beauty of horses, which appears repeatedly in the Homeric poems, was to continue
through the ancient world, and survive till it became the root of the word 'chivalry'.
The Dauphin's speech about his horse in Shakespeare's Henry V, although partly
intended as satire, expresses the feelings of most young men of spirit (and means)
up to 1914.
When I bestride him,
I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he
touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes ... It
is a beast for Perseus: he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and
water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him: he
is indeed a horse; and all other jades you may call beasts.
The point is that the
artists treatment of horses down the ages says more about the
human response to animals than about the horse itself.
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Parthenon frieze
The Greeks, although
much less interested in animals than the Egyptians, had one
superb vehicle for their sense of beauty, the horse. In Greece beauty became the
artist's main objective, and was applied to the human face and body with such a
mania for perfection, that for centuries the words 'beauty' and 'Greek' were practically
interchangeable.
Archaic Greek art produced
small bronzes of horses, stylized to the point of
abstraction. Charming as they are, they do not show any feeling for beauty in the
naturalistic sense. This first appears on the frieze of the Siphnian Treasury in Delphi
of about 525 bc. They display all the elements which, a century later, were to be
developed and given livelier movement in what are arguably the most beautiful
horses in art, those which cavort round the frieze of the Parthenon. Although they tug
at their vanished reins, and long to break into a gallop, they seem conscious of the
fact that they are taking part in some great ceremonial; they are proudly vigorous,
and beauty still predominates. The splendid curves of energy — the neck and the
rump, united by the passive curve of the belly, and capable of infinite variation, from
calm to furious strength — are without question the most satisfying piece of formal
relationship in nature: so much so that good photographs of horses have the same
effect on some people as works of art. In this respect a well- bred horse is to some
extent the result of the art of selective breeding.
How much the Greeks
valued the beauty of horses is shown by their coinage: a
chariot drawn by four horses of unequalled elegance is the reverse of the most
beautiful coin in the world, the dechadrem of Syracuse commemorates the prowess
of the Macedonian cavalry on the reverse of a coin of Philip II; and the horse's head,
that was to influence Leonardo da Vinci, is the reverse of a dechadrem of Alexander
the Great.
There is on the Acropolis
the fragment of a marble horse of the fifth century, which
must originally have been one of the most beautiful pieces of animal sculpture in the
world, and was probably the inspiration of a small bronze horse in the Metropolitan
Museum of questionable date, but unquestionable charm. The most famous life-size
horses of Antiquity still exist undamaged, thanks to the predatory instincts of the
Venetians, who were prepared to commit any crime to decorate their Basilica. The
horses of St Mark's are so familiar, and so much a part of the marvellous show-case
of the facade, that we forget what extraordinary survivals of antique sculpture they
are. Whether or not they are copies made to fob off the Emperor Nero, they certainly
go back, to fifth-century originals, and have never been surpassed.
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Domenichino
Horses play relatively
little part in early medieval art. Their curves could not be
assimilated into the angularity of Gothic. However, the later Middle Ages invented one
of the most beautiful of all animals, which in fact never existed, that exquisite white
pony with a goat's beard, a flowing tail and a long horn growing straight out of the
middle of its forehead, known as the unicorn. Everything about the unicorn is
mysterious, and leads to a string of unanswerable questions. What does it really
signify? Students of allegory and iconography give contradictory answers. What were
its origins? It is said to have originated in India, and it appears in Pliny, who says that
it is a fierce and dangerous animal, but when it sees a virgin it lays its head
submissively in her lap. In consequence the Physiologus makes the unicorn one of
the supporters of the Virgin Mary. It plays a minor role in the early Middle Ages; then,
in the fifteenth century, it comes to fill some imaginative need, and inspires two of the
greatest masterpieces of late Gothic art. These are the tapestries of the Hunt of the
Unicorn in the Metropolitan Museum (thand the slightly later tapestries in the Musce
dc Cluny, known as the Lady and the Unicorn. Looking at these marvellous works of
art we cannot help asking more questions. Where were they made? For whom were
they made? Above all, what is their subject? Nobody knows. The catalogue of the
Cloisters states with bland confidence 'The subject of the tapestries is an allegory of
the Incarnation in which the Unicorn, a symbol of purity representing Christ, is hunted
and captured.'
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Leonardo da Vinci
After the sixteenth
century the Medieval poetical allegory of beauty, with all its baffling
associations, disappears from art. Leonardo da Vinci was studying its beauty from
an almost exactly opposite point of view. At almost every point in his career as an
artist, until his last years, he was at work on some commission that involved a horse;
first the Adoration of the Magi for San Scopeto; then, for fifteen years, the giant horse
of the Sforza monument; then the Battle of Anghiari; and finally the monument to
Marshal Trivulzio.
No one has ever observed
horses more sympathetically, and also more scientifically,
for he wrote a treatise on the anatomy of the horse, now lost, and did measured
drawings in which he tried to apply to the proportions of a horse the same kind of
complex mathematical progressions that he and Diirer were applying to the human
body. Apparently this horse was the 'Gianecto Grosso' of Messer Mariolo, and I am
inclined to think that this is the same animal who appears in the most beautiful of all
Leonardo's drawings of horses. This drawing was done in about 1490. Both before
and after Leonardo did studies of horses with an intention different from this living
naturalism. The earlier ones, grouped round the Adoration of the Magi for S. Donate
a Scopeto, are reflections of that dream which haunted the imagination of
Renaissance antiquity. Leonardo has used reliefs and coins to nourish his ideal: in
fact the closest parallel is a series of carvings that he can never have seen, the
frieze of the Mausoleum. These dream horses continued into the first period in Milan,
and appear drawings evidently intended as a project for an equestrian monument,
although technically it could not have been carried out as sculpture. This Leonardo
recognized, and for thirty years he worked on a series of drawings of horses that are
directly concerned with his sculptural projects. They are admirable drawings, but
they lack the magic of the lunar apparitions in the Adoration. In the years between his
two monuments he did the studies for his great battle of horses, the Battle of
Anghiari, which I shall return to when I consider how beauty gives way to energy.
From the beginning the beauty of animals has been linked with -— admiration for
their energy. 'Energy,' said Blake, 'is eternal delight.' And it was this, presumably, that
induced Leonardo, to whom war " was 'a most beastly madness', to choose as the
subject of the greatest painting of his Florentine years a battle of horses. |
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Whistlejacket: Stubbs
Stubbs was an observer;
in some of his pictures of mares and foals he is so touched
by the sheer beauty of the subject that his detached observations are transformed;
and in one painting he leaves his deliberate naturalism behind, and sets out to create
an ideal horse.
This is Whistlejacket, surely
one of the greatest pictures of an animal ever painted.
Mares and foals: Stubbs
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Delacroix
'The tigers of wrath
are wiser than the horses of instruction': said Blake, and he was,
as usual, forestalling that new direction in human feeling which we call Romanticism.
Man in his relationship with animals began to sympathize with the ferocity, the cruelty
even, that he had previously dreaded and opposed. The greatest exponent of this
new religion of violence was Delacroix. He felt a personal sympathy with the pride
and aloofness of the tiger, and realized it in the magnificent early painting in the
Louvre of a tiger playing with its mother. But this quiet dignity did not satisfy him as
much as did the glory of carnage. The pictures in which he celebrates it are usually
described as 'lion-hunts', but there is no evidence that the men have had the insolent
courage to go out hunting lions. These are simply episodes in a war between men
and animals in which, for the first time in art, the outcome is uncertain.
The horse plays a large
part in Delacroix animal battle pieces, but it is far from being
the horse of instruction. Usually it is the wretched victim. But occasionally it too is
made to participate in the general frenzy, as in the famous watercolour in the Louvre
of a horse frightened by lightning. Delacroix noted in his Journal, 'Art does not
consist in copying nature, but in recreating it, and this applies particularly to the
representation of animals'; and he adds a comment on horses 'One mustn't aim at
the perfection of the naturalists'. The words come to our mind in front of his picture of
horses fighting in a stable, which is certainly not painted from nature, but is a superb
arabesque of animal ferocity.
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Degas had almost
Leonardo's technical skill as a draughtsman, and his drawings of
horses are sometimes so like Leonardo's that one might, in memory, confuse them.
Two things in the world gave him pure aesthetic pleasure, the ballet and the
racecourse, and, although he could sometimes be cruel to dancers, he always
looked with admiration at les purs sang. He never painted a horse in isolation, or
insisted on its plastic qualities, as Stubbs and Gericault had done. In the age of the
camera, his horses are part of the general scene, at the beginning or the end of a
race, often confused with other horses but observed with an unequalled sense of
their grace and energy.
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