Just How Big Was the Horse?

Image: Leonardo da Vinci, Rearing Horse, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

It is hard to imagine the difficulties Leonardo da Vinci and the previous sculptors had in designing a rearing horse statue until one considers just how big the project Leonardo envisioned. Leonardo did not simply plan to build a life-sized equestrian sculpture. He wanted to create a monument roughly three times the height of a real horse. Art historian Virginia Bush (1978) emphasized the unprecedented scale, writing, "A permanent statue the size and bulk of Leonardo's Sforza horse would have been unprecedented in Renaissance Italy..." (p. 56).

So just how big was the horse?

Leonardo meticulously recorded his plans in the notebooks he always kept nearby. He estimated that an average horse stood about seven feet tall. However, he had promised Ludovico far more than an average sculpture. He believed the monument's enormous size would demonstrate the political power and prestige of the Sforza family (Bush, 1978). The larger the horse, the stronger the message.

Leonardo's notebooks reveal that his final design called for a horse measuring twelve braccia, or approximately twenty-one feet (6.4 meters) in length, roughly three times the length of a real horse (Bush, 1978). Leonardo estimated that he would require more than seventy tons of bronze. The completed monument would weigh approximately eighty tons, or 160,000 libbre, according to his notebooks. When met with criticism or doubt, Leonardo pointed out that classical Greek and Roman texts described multiple figures of massive proportions (Bush, 1978). 

By all accounts, Ludovico Sforza was thrilled. Historian Virginia Bush (1978) explains that the size was no accident. Based on Greek artistic tradition, mortal men were honored with life-sized statues. Statues one and a half times the size of the subject were reserved for kings. Heroes, such as the mythical Hercules, were honored with sculptures twice their size. Only the gods were celebrated with monuments three times their size or larger. Clearly, Ludovico believed his father deserved this extraordinary honor. 

The immense size of the Sforza Horse was intended to honor Francesco Sforza in a way no equestrian monument had before. However, that extraordinary scale also created engineering and casting challenges unlike anything attempted during the Renaissance. Leonardo had designed a monument worthy of kings and gods, but bringing it to life would prove to be an entirely different challenge.

Further Reading

Bush, Virginia I. (1978). Leonardo's Sforza Monument and

Cinquecento Sculpture. Arte Lombarda, 50, 47–68.