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.
